October’s Artist of the Month is Kate Spring, co-owner of Good Heart Farmstead in Worcester. The Farmstead offers CSA shares between January and November, while also providing items wholesale to area restaurants and selling at the Worcester Farmers Market. Along with running an organic farm and writing her blog, The Good Heart Life, Spring has added photography to her repertoire.

“Photography got started from my dad,” she says. “He is an amazing photographer and has always spent a lot of his free time taking photos. When I was growing up, we would get up really early in the morning and go out and get lost on back roads in Vermont and take pictures. That was my introduction to photography. I worked on a farm in Alaska in 2010 and when I went there, my dad gave me one of his cameras. It was so beautiful and I really started taking a lot more photos. It was a combination of being on the farm and in wild spaces.”

Today, being on a farm every day informs much of Spring’s photography. With a camera or an iPhone always on hand, she finds inspiration “in the midst of the work.” This might include CSA shares, vegetables that have just been harvested, or something seemingly random, like a rutabaga in the shape of a heart.  She believes that while it may not be a flawless example of a rutabaga, it’s still very beautiful, as are other seconds vegetables that add “so much color and texture” to her photos.

Spring is excited to be presenting something “bigger in scale” at the first ever public showing of her photography outside of marketing the farm, Instagram and her blog. “I wanted the show to be a reflection of the farm and that’s mainly what I take pictures of these days,” she says. “I think I pulled out like forty photos and my dad helped me whittle them down to twelve.”

“One thing that sort of fuels me is how beautiful food can be. We are an organic farm. But within farming, what we want to do is connect people to their food. We are always trying to increase that connection,” Spring notes. “It’s about connecting people to the bounty of what is really close at hand.”

Kate Spring’s photography will be hanging in the café throughout the month of October. Photos are available for purchase and 15% of each sale will go to benefit the NOFA-VT Farm Share Program.