Kate O'Connor

Project title: Response Art and Burnout: An Arts-Based Heuristic Inquiry

Kate O’Connor is an emerging Art Therapist, Mental Health Nurse and visual artist living and working on Yuggera and Turrbal Country. Her art practice explores her internal world, giving form to the emotional, relational, and often mundane aspects of everyday life. She creates with a sense of honesty, humour, and reflection—drawing from lived experience. 

Kate’s journey into Art Therapy began during her time working in acute psychiatric inpatient units, where she witnessed the powerful impact of creative expression on people even at their lowest. Wanting to move beyond the limitations of the medical model in nursing, and seeking to honour her lifelong connection to art, Kate found Art Therapy to be a deeply meaningful and humanising path. 

For nearly a decade, Kate has worked in diverse public mental health settings across remote, regional, and metropolitan Australia. While rewarding, this work has also taken a personal toll. Experiences of burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma led Kate to a state of emotional depletion—where she found herself increasingly disconnected from both clients and self. 

Kate’s research—a heuristic, arts-based self-inquiry—focuses on exploring her lived experience of burnout through the practice of daily response art. This creative process provides space for reflection, containment, and meaning making, allowing Kate to regain insight, reconnect with her values, and reimagine how she shows up in her work. 

The artworks in this series arise from that inquiry. These works on paper—intuitively created with mixed media—mirror the breakdown of systems, both personal and professional. In their abstract imagery of bodily forms, Kate reflects on her own body’s inability to sustain itself through illness – a direct result of her burnout – as well as the parallels she observed within her role as a community mental health nurse: systems of care that often fail to sustain their clinicians. The resulting body of work is simultaneously raw and reflective, capturing both the sickness of burnout and the flashes of clarity that come through creative practice. 

Kate’s practice serves as both a visual journal and a survival strategy. These pieces invite viewers—particularly those in helping professions—to witness the emotional truths often hidden beneath the surface, and to consider the role of creativity in strengthening presence, purpose, and self-compassion. 

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