KATIE BENSON



Photographer • Oil Painter • Botanical Artist

Welcome to my studio.

While earning my BFA in Studio Art from BYU, I was often encouraged to choose a single artistic focus. But I just couldn’t. Instead, my practice happily grew in two directions: contemporary art and botanical art.

My contemporary art works across media to explore themes we don’t talk about openly enough, such as illness, marginalization, belonging, and isolation. Drawing from personal experiences and the stories of people close to me, I use photography, painting, ink, or installation to create space for empathy, reflection, and conversations about these experiences. Through my work, I seek to bring attention to these overlooked circumstances, making space for discussions that are left unspoken by those who deserve to be seen and heard.

As a counterbalance to these intense subjects, I create botanical drawings and paintings using thousands of carefully placed colored dots, a technique related to pointillism. In a world that feels chaotic and unpredictable, this meditative and painstaking process brings a sense of calm and order, transforming individual marks into vibrant forms through structured layers of color. The dots blend in the viewer's eye, creating the illusion of form, depth, and solidity to become something whole and meaningful. 

In many ways, my two artistic practices are connected. Both seek to make sense of complexity and confusion. Both seek to be seen. Whether I am exploring difficult human experiences or building a flower from countless individual dots, I am interested in finding meaning, beauty, and order within the chaos.