Listening to the Space: A Tree That Asked Me to Pause

A reflective look at a handmade wire tree that challenged my creative process, inviting me to embrace negative space, trust intuition, and let nature-inspired art evolve naturally.

Every so often, a piece comes along that quietly asks more questions than it answers. This tree is one of those pieces.

At first glance, it’s clearly different from my current collection. The colors are familiar — gold and blue, two tones I’ve always loved — but the feeling is new. The left side is full of movement and detail: blooming wire flowers, twisting branches, and a trunk that feels alive with motion. And then there’s the right side… open, airy, almost untouched.

My first instinct was to fix it.

I kept asking myself what was missing. Should I add more branches? Balance it out? Fill the space so it matched the rest of the tree? I even started imagining additions — a wire dragonfly drifting through the open space, a delicate moon hugging the hoop, maybe even a soft sun shape in complementary tones.

But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized something important: the space wasn’t empty — it was intentional.

The open side began to feel like sky. Or water. Or breath. It gave the tree room to exist without asking it to perform. The negative space pulled my attention back to the twist of the trunk, the contrast between gold and blue, and the quiet story unfolding between the two sides.

This tree challenged my habit of adding more simply because I can. It reminded me that not every space needs to be filled, and not every piece needs to follow the same rules as the ones before it. Sometimes restraint is part of the design. Sometimes the pause is the point.

I still see endless potential in this tree — and maybe that’s exactly why I’m leaving it as it is, at least for now. It feels like a threshold piece, a moment of transition, both creatively and personally. A reminder to trust the process, listen closely, and let the work tell me what it needs instead of forcing it into something familiar.

This piece may never look like the others in my collection, and I think that’s okay. It’s a quiet invitation to slow down, to notice the space between things, and to find beauty not just in what’s added — but in what’s left open.