The Cathections

An evolving sculptural world built from found photographs, paper, handmade objects, wood, metal, paint, gemstones, and collected fragments.

The name comes from cathexis: the investment of emotional, mental, or psychic energy into an object until that object becomes charged with importance. In the studio, a Cathection begins as an image-fragment and becomes something attended to: cut, folded, woven, built, repaired, arranged, and believed into objecthood.

The works move between relief, freestanding object, collection, and installation. Some Cathections are held within grids or fields; others gather into specimens, grottoes, supports, boxes, and intimate architectural spaces. Across these forms, the work asks the same questions: when does an image become an object? When does a fragment become a collection? When does looking become a form of entering?

Each Cathection suggests something almost recognizable: a specimen, tool, trophy, relic, shrine object, machine part, or ceremonial fragment. But the forms resist stable identity. They remain unresolved, gathered into arrangements that ask to be read through sustained looking rather than decoded at once.

Cathections occupy a space of scale confusion. Are these miniature artifacts, enlarged organisms, models, relics, or fragments of something larger? The question remains open. The works invite a visual amble through forms that appear collected, handled, preserved, built, or unearthed.

© 2026 Deborah Kraft