Portrait of Emma Windsor Liscombe

Deep under fathoms of dreams, Emma used to feel the weighty tangibility of her cousin Justine’s presence. Her corporeal vanilla scent floating softly through Emma’s ethereal world.

It was the kind of summer’s day when everyone was becoming unglued from the heat; sweat soaking through the adhesive holding us together. Sunlight hammered the earth as if it were an anvil. I was holding a cold plastic bottle of water to my forehead while waiting for artist Emma Windsor-Liscombe to answer the door. The building that housed her live-in studio had these white-washed art deco balconies that glowed incandescently in the heat.

My eyes cooled in the shades of her outfit; a collared top of muted grey paired with black wide-leg trousers, grounded by a pair of white socks. Her svelte silhouette moves like the breeze, which is just as well because even the soft timbre of her voice sounds like the wind talking. With her hair neatly tied back, the lagoon of her soul was reflecting out of marbled blue eyes.

Crossing the threshold into Emma’s flat felt like entering a secluded and untouched clearing in a forest. Grey carpet cushioned every sound the way the embrace of thick foliage does. The sounds of the world floated through her window with a wistful, disconnected ambience. The place wasn’t huge, it was expansive; from the anteroom where I awkwardly took off my shoes to the front room she was welcoming me into, I got the impression that the walls and ceilings only delineated a physical barrier. Something about her flat extended endlessly above and across. The austere lack of furniture contributed to this inflation of space. Two chairs made eyes at each other from opposite ends of the room, a collection of her finished paintings leaned against two walls (one hidden under a ghostly white sheet), a couple of smaller pieces lay drying by the foot of her easel that was positioned to catch the cornucopia of light flooding through her window, and an iPad lay plugged in on the floor. Whether it was the blissfully bare walls or the air molecules’ arrested motion, I was intoxicated by the stillness in her flat.

“I wouldn’t sit on that if I were you,” she warned me gently about the structural integrity of her chairs. The absurd irony of owning chairs that fail their sole purpose makes one appreciate them with their eyes as much as their behind. Truly, beauty resided in their faded green upholstery, their calligraphic curves, their sombre simplicity. “Aren’t they pretty?” Emma said. “I found them on Facebook Marketplace but I need to get around to restoring them. One day… The only one strong enough to sit on is the one by my desk,” she added, pointing towards the anteroom.

While pacing around the room, taking extra care not to step on the paintings drying on the floor, I asked her to furnish me with details of her life…

When Emma was a teenager, she never understood why Justine wasn’t around that often. Now she does… When they finally connected, she remembers being incredibly excited to have this best friend in a way she’d never have with anyone else. And suddenly she’s gone.

One part Canadian to one part Welsh – hence the mellifluous accent – through the many places she’s lived and passed, painting has remained her primary and constant compulsion. She’ll get up, go for a walk, do the chores; but all throughout, a magnetic attraction pulls her to her easel and sketchbook. Once she’s there, the work she produces has the visual harmony of an orchestra tuning their instruments; colour, form, and proportion synchronising beautifully to the pitch of life. At the core of her passions is the desire to tell a story. The swirling paint in her compositions coalesce into universally human narratives; snippets of people’s lives, moments of carefree insignificance, and unwitting involvement in something huge.

“I think part of it,” she says thoughtfully, “is how people are arranged.” She’s concerned with the arrangement of expressions that make up a person as much as she is with the arrangement of people that make up our world. “I’ll often pick a face - usually someone I knew but not always. I do a lot of research too, into individuals and their lives. It’s like casting an actor, they represent what I’m trying to tell.”

The journalistic rigour with which she explores the lives of people before depicting their stories is exemplified by her series called Jane. Even though these are mugshots of American women who provided abortions in the 60’s and 70’s, they stare out at us with stoicism. As unshakeable as the conviction of these women is the stylistic integrity with which Emma has rendered their faces. Soft, pinky hues dapple around the solidity of their expressions, elaborating their inner world in a way the police camera never could have. Given the pernicious stripping of women’s rights in the USA and other parts of the world, this series maintains relevance.

Jane is a good starting point if one, like me, wanted to undertake a study of faces in Emma’s oeuvre. There’s an amorphous, hazy quality to everyone who appears in her paintings; as if their features float upon restless skin. They’re reminiscent of the faces in Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings, minus the malice. To me, her faces appear as if in a fading memory or a dream. A figure who’s features morph by being passed down to each successive generation. Hemingway once wrote that we die two deaths; when we’re buried and when our name is uttered or memory recalled for the last time. Every dab of paint in Emma’s portraits, thus, comes to represent a transformation of that person; not just during the time it took to complete that painting but all the way till their second death. Freed from the specificity of detail and fact, these figures become immortalised in myth.

Emma’s tendency for storytelling nourishes itself off the endless banquet of human existence. In what would seem like an insignificant fraction of time on a cosmic scale, we’ve lived, loved, created, killed, revived, repulsed; we’ve altered the face of this planet, pulled apart the tapestry of biology one thread of DNA at a time, and have created the means of our own annihilation; we’ve rationalised magic and mystified knowledge; we’ve laughed with friends and cried over heartbreaks; we’ve hurled objects at walls in frustration just like we’ve flung satellites in space; and now we turn our covetous gaze at the galaxy. All these events and more have been recorded to some questionable degree of accuracy in our history books. Emma, however, is more interested in the myths between the lines.

With a spark of sublime intelligence in her eyes, she says, “There’s so much that is disturbing and painful happening alongside so much that is beautiful and romantic and magical… So I feel like a mythology is a kind of legacy where all the experiences we can expect or that we can learn from are jumbled up together. Whereas maybe other stories are very deliberate; this is how it begins, maybe this happens, and then it’s resolved. But a myth is never really like that…”

Back to faces again, her Portraits of [] series becomes a site of myth-making through these ceremonial paintings of people known or unknown. Whether they’re family members, friends, historical figures, or occupants of a specific moment in time, they hold some shining significance for Emma. And because the boundary between the private and public is often the width of a hair, what at first seems like a personal mythology holds aspects people can collectively relate to. Seen from the temporal flatness of our contemporary world, the figures in these portraits look as if they could belong to any time period. Where histories are mostly compartmentalised in their specific timeframes, myths permeate and simmer through the ages.

Those of you with keener eyes than me may have noticed empty gaps in some of these portraits; shafts of white canvas standing out like islands against a rolling ocean of paint. Artists have different reasons for leaving parts of their compositions untouched. Whether it’s for stylistic reasons or knowing when to stop – blank spots represent a dialogue between the artist and their creation. What is Emma’s work saying to her?

Subterranean themes of trauma, consent, and (dis)empowerment run through her work. A sad and repugnant condition of this world is that women are disproportionately victims of a whole unspeakable host of gendered crimes such as rape, trafficking, harassment, and assault. As someone who can relate to this vulnerability, she responds to it with her work so others may feel empowered. During the first couple of months of when she moved back to London in 2021, something traumatising happened which struck mortal fear through her. It manifested in her work as a fear of completion. To create something is to siphon volumes of your soul into your work; creator and creation inextricably linked. Thus, the completion of art could represent a part of the artist dying and living on through their work.

While the blank spots in her Portraits of [] signify the artist’s trauma, that same emptiness in her grand family portrait of the Romanov’s are marks of a traumatised artwork. Delicately lifting the white sheet off a stack of paintings, she spoke lightly, “This is sad but I bought this sheet for this exact purpose. It felt… I don’t know… it felt oddly mature. Isn’t that weird? Of all the things about moving, I bought a sheet… to cover the paintings.”

“What about it feels mature?” I asked with a chuckle.

“I don’t know…” she laughed, “Because it’s what I wanted and it’s not necessarily reasonable to everyone around me… but it feels uniquely reasonable to me.”

“Well, sometimes we do things because it’s the appropriate thing to do, even if it doesn’t bring us any pleasure,” I added.

“I think that’s it. Anyway…” she said while flicking through the stack of paintings, “I was really interested with interpretations of trauma and family so I painted this…”

It was difficult to tear my eyes away from it. Posing for a family portrait are the last generation of the Romanovs, the tsar of Russia in military gear while the tsarina, tsarevnas, and other relatives are dressed in the height of regal summer fashion. The lush greens of their garden and the pinks of their dresses waltz before my eyes, choreographed by Emma’s gliding brushstrokes. They’re almost fusing into one another, bound together by the same tragic fate as Russia implodes under their watch. On their tumultuous faces they wear such grave expressions – a family made ghosts before their time. And sure enough, the base material peeks through several spots left blank.

“This is a piece of MDF I found at the recycling bins at the RCA,” she tells me with a fluttering voice, “it was really mouldy and was still kinda curved, but I liked that! And the gaps are where the mould stains were coming through the… priming agent. I wanted to paint these people on a surface that’s literally traumatised. I feel it’s very important that the material and theme should serve each other.”

She’s of the opinion that everything in the history of the world seems more real after the Romanovs are shot. Widespread (almost state-sanctioned) religiosity had cultivated a mindset of soft acceptance. Things were hard for many people but they did all they could to accept their lot in life. And if all else failed, God would foot the bill – hopefully. But the bullets that ventilated the Romanovs set into motion a prodigious chain of events; the bloody and revolutionary rise of Communism in Russia that inevitably led to Stalin’s hideous regime, the birth of the modern super powered state and the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, and the geopolitical projectile vomit we find the world in today. “If anything is happening in one corner of the world,” she said in a leaden voice, “it’s happening everywhere.” The media vortex attacks our cerebral cortex with inescapable current affairs. Anyone with a half-working conscience will look around and find all of this too overwhelming. Even religion doesn’t hold the same sway anymore because, for a lot of people, God left the building long ago.

Faced with an uncertain future ahead, we’re unable to put the past behind us. Each generation with a more accessible and thorough record of history is increasingly obsessed with some or other moment from the past. We pay priceless homage to some beloved time period; emulating its style, exploring its cultural artefacts, and incorporating into our present bits that we like while discarding the rest like sandwich crusts. Whether these idealised eras were lived personally or vicariously, we relapse into the past out of longing for something missing from our present.

Justine’s mother used to jokingly say to her, “you’re always going to be six aren’t you?” Some may think that’s regressive but Emma asks how one is even supposed to get up in the morning if they can’t find purity and goodness in the world like a six-year-old does?

“It’s funny you should bring that up because this painting…” she says while roaming over to the other wall against which some works are leaning, “is a piece of something. I’m really intrigued by this idea that we’re all looking for this – frankly – idealistic notion of home and there are places we project that onto. But at the same time, it’s not real… Or if it is it’s maybe not what we imagined. People throw this word ‘nostalgia’ around so often. For me, nostalgia is a kind of pain too.”

While she spoke, I was getting lost in the touching scene of her painting; two women and a baby reposed in a sunny lawn against a brick wall that defies all conventions of architecture with its waviness. There’s a rural air to their dress and setting, as if survival depends on the summer’s yield. However, I detect something vague in the women’s expressions – I hasten to say… dysphoria, not aimed at themselves but at the world around them. She’s applied the marks in such a way that the eyes slip from one brushstroke to another, struggling to find purchase in a manner similar to these women’s fight to find footing in life.

With a look of sharp concentration Emma said, “Well these women in this painting are about to be raped,” – having probably based them off specific people or a general condition of female mistreatment of the time. “But they’re completely calm, not because they embrace it – far from it – but it’s because they’re still empowered… I don’t know. They know who they are, they know that it’s wrong. The empowerment is in the knowing what’s going to happen, even if it’s the worst thing that could happen.”

Which kind of explains Emma’s almost non-stop consumption of the news. Knowing the events of the world is a heavy burden she feels empowered by; one can tell by the look of intense worldly awareness that beams out of her eyes like lapis lazuli. 

She’s still trying to figure out how to place that word; empowerment. There’s some spirit she can’t name that spurs her to depict women like that. She just knows it’s important that they are. “Maybe it’s as simple as the fact,” Emma says softly, “that they’re represented somehow. So this lady in the white,” she said, pointing at the figure in the painting, “died by suicide. And I feel like if you don’t depict these women, the shame that is so often placed on that topic remains just a little bit more. But also you don’t honour someone who has been through that.”

She floated towards the other stack of paintings and pulled out this squared scene of four women sat on what looks like a park bench, enchantingly thick foliage engulfing the background. They wear expressions of ambiguous comfort upon their faces with the same contentment as their marvellous summer dress or their totally uninhibited postures. A veritable landscape unfolds amidst the greenery that embraces them. In this painting, entitled Bloom II, I felt welcomed in the company of these women.

She continued fervently, “What interests me with this is how do you depict what feels like a collective female mythology. Anyone could look at these and relate to something, but it does feel more specific to women. It felt important to paint this because, I mean, look at the world now. In some places in the world you can’t go and speak in public if you’re a woman. Look at what’s happening in the United States.”

Enraptured by the painting, I asked, “A lot of your work is very heavily influenced by the lives of other women… How has your life as a woman influenced your work?”

A helicopter was circling noisily low overhead.

“Well…” she ventured, “I can relate to a lot of the things they’ve been through… painfully. I’ve been through forms of some of the experiences these women have been through, and how it fucks them up with their body and their head. But I don’t think because I’ve been through this kind of pain, I have to paint it. Because honestly, I’ve always felt kind of stupid that I’ve struggled with the worst place that a depression can take you or the worst place a not-so-nice-guy can take you. I know you’re not supposed to feel stupid about it, but I do.”

As I listened to her words, I thought that even if she didn’t go through exactly what these women had, yet could still relate with them enough to depict them, alongside her artistic prowess, there’s some aspect of a female mythology at work here too.

“So it’s not about me,” she clarified, “I think I’m just good at telling a story. I don’t think I’m great at anything other than that actually… But I feel like it still matters that it’s documented, and that whatever I document, I can say I have some level of understanding of. Human beings, so much of us have been through so many things and… nobody ever knows. So I thought, maybe I should talk about some of the things people have gone through. I think, if you feel safe doing that, you might make someone else feel a little less lonely.”

It's an inherent human trait to project our experiences onto that of others, making sense of ourselves in relation to others. Even if it’s a depiction of another. Indeed, we see the whole world through a anthropocentric lens. Thus, Emma hopes that her art contributes something to the world; even if one person felt comforted by finding an aspect of themselves in her work, she feels like she’s done her job. Hence why even though her work speaks a feminine tongue, she wants it to be for everyone.

“I could stand here and tell you my paintings are about X, Y, and Z,” she said, “but if you see something completely different then I think that’s important. A painting should tell a story but it should also be relatable. What interests me is learning what someone who doesn’t have to like the work thinks.” This could be anyone outside an art-world context. Work had to be done to her place soon after she moved in, so contractors were coming and going. And naturally they’d see her paintings in various stages of completion. “Every single one…” Emma said with a hint of surprise, “you think they just want to work and be left alone, but they always talk about the paintings. It’s always the same thing; in a roundabout way, everyone basically says there’s something relatable about them.”

Such is the subconscious level at which art operates. Even a person staring uncomprehendingly at a painting is still looking. They’ll chance on some vaguely familiar quality that gets wrapped up in the vast web of associations they have of the world. Ricocheting like a crazed pinball in every direction of their concept of reality, it’ll eventually strike upon some idea or comparison so marvellously that it’ll shatter into a countless pieces of sense. Sometimes this realisation is arrived at instantly, sometimes it burrows away in your brain, only to resurface years later. But when you look at a piece of art, you just know. And an art degree or a knowledge of art history isn’t a prerequisite for this feeling.

Emma fondly remembers how Justine could perfectly impersonate the honking of a Canada goose. It was uncanny, but more than that it pointed towards a playfully funny soul.

What I found perhaps most intriguing about Emma’s place was the complete absence of any paint stains on the carpet. Painting with oil in a carpeted room was is a bold move, but keeping it spotless is beyond impressive. A look of childlike enthusiasm burned in her eyes when I asked for her secret.

She went to the adjoining kitchen and presented a bottle of Astonish carpet cleaner. “It is astonishing!” she quipped. “I don’t make a mess, but every now and again one of those brushes will just… tip off the palate and leave a mark. It drives me nuts. But the fact that I can remove it is amazing.”

As a fellow neat freak, I luxuriated in the immaculate state of her flat. The vast, horizonless sense of emptiness had the peacefulness of standing alone on the shore. This, Emma tells me, is deliberate as the emptiness helps her think. She needs the calmness. I attribute this to the imperceptible motion - as of clouds dragging across the sky - in her paintings. As opposed to long, sweeping strokes, Emma’s compositions accumulate patiently with considered marks that never go further than they need to. Look at Bloom III for example, a scene seemingly depicting a picnic. The women’s cheerful faces seem to shift, the tablecloth undulates with their dresses, while the trees sway in the wind. You can almost feel the breeze caressing your cheeks.

When she applied for the RCA in December of 2021, she spent a month after Christmas in this house in Nova Scotia; her only company being her one-eyed rescue dog called Missy. Feeling disoriented and worried about the undefined direction of her life, Emma had a bit of a breakdown. With Nature in her wildest moods, snowstorms beset the place, causing numerous power outages. While the house creaked under a fusillade of snow, all Emma did was paint and convince Missy to go for a walk. Things began making sense to her once she got accepted to the RCA in January. I imagine that velvety stillness of that house to be an embodiment of Emma during that time of her life, caught in the middle of a storm. The serene state in which she paints presents a sumptuous juxtaposition against the fundamental kinesis of reality. Everything, from the frenetic oscillation of subatomic particles to the wheeling stoicism of galaxies, is in motion. And at the epicentre of it all is Emma, paintbrushes in hand.

Emergence is the process where something complex is produced from the interactions between its simple parts. Think of the emergence of consciousness from neurons or strategic behaviour in ant colonies. Similarly, through Emma’s glacial accretion of paint, a rich emotional depth emerges in her figures, even when their faces aren’t entirely discernible. She puts it a lot more succinctly than me, “Each layer must have value.” She imbues every application of paint with emotion, and through this psychological patch-work, large portions of the human condition come fizzing to the surface. With an x-ray perception of her craft, she says, “I’m not really a photorealist, so documenting through drawing or painting renders a unique truth. Why is it that I really need this line or this brushstroke to be like that? And it must have a psychological weight to it.”

“What about the colours?” I asked. “You’ve got a very specific palate of warm hues, lots of greens, pinks, and pale browns.”

“It’s really obvious and not complex,” she replied with kind off-handedness, “I just paint what I’m drawn to. Colour is a feeling. This green,” pointing to the painting with the wavy bricks, “feels calm and soothing in a painting that’s about basically longing to be somewhere that’s completely gone with these people who seem to maintain a certain stoicism we can pull strength from, so those colours feel important.” In the stories she’s telling, the sensual and romantic coexists with the grotesquely violent, and her jewel box colour palate, as described by her, reinforces this duality.

Something had been tugging at the corner of my eye, an anomaly compared to the rest of her work. Against a background of curdled blood, a ballet doll stood with one arm raised as if pointing towards something horrid. With eyes like two black holes and a brittle expression, she reminded me of my fragile mortality. Even Emma eyed it cautiously. One can see the genesis of her refined style in this small artwork but it’s clouded, as if by a confusing fog.

“I definitely don’t paint like this anymore,” she said, “it’s very strange to look at and I’ve probably overworked this, but it makes sense. It’s about this person who really bad things happen to but was also really lovely and funny, and I mean she was fucking funny. And when you know what happened to her, it’s alarming to say the least.”

It was a Thursday. Emma was drawing flowers when she got a call from her dad…

“…Justine’s died,” he told her. He said it almost casually but only because he didn’t know how else to articulate it. It was an overdose. Emma’s been no stranger to sadness but this time was different. Her cries were weeping and breathing as one. Based on everything she knew about Justine; her addiction, the bullying, the trauma, she doesn’t know how she survived that long. The faces of all the people – known and unknown – who’d picked on Justine flashed through her mind like a procession of mugshots. How could they have? She was so nice. There was a tough side to her too, but also she thought she was tougher than she really was.

Emma’s grief had linked arms with rage during the funeral. Justine’s mother is speaking at the podium. Between crying and trying to hold it together, Emma wanted to warm her aunt’s heart somehow. Someone had put together a slideshow with tender images of Justine accompanied with Lady Gaga’s “Joanne (Where Do You Think You’re Going)”. She remembers looking around feeling anger beyond description at anyone who wasn’t or didn’t seem sad. This was beyond overwhelming.

In the following few days she’d have these dreams about Justine, pervaded by her vanilla scent, where she’s a kid again with her older cousin who could do no wrong. “And I guess that’s nostalgia…” she says to me now, “when you’re fantasising about a certain moment in which the people around you could do no wrong.”

After waiting a long enough time, Emma asked her aunt if she could visit Justine’s room where she died. An inexplicable desire to be in that place had taken a strong hold of her. Maybe you’re still here… but in the end she felt like she was invading a bit. Her aunt, however, let her take a couple of Justine’s things; a hoodie that still bears her vanilla scent, which Emma refuses to touch lest the smell goes away; a bracelet; and a pair of tap and ballet shoes. What really vibrated with Justine’s spirit was a My Little seahorse Pony – the original one – covered in pencil and bite marks collected from years of everyone in the family playing with it. But her aunt couldn’t bring herself to part with it.

Emma had been a practising artist long before Justine’s passing, but it was this cataclysmic event that tore the skies open and exposed her to an entirely different kind of emotion and longing. The only way forward is through, so that’s precisely what she did. Even today, Justine’s presence – like a spiritual muse – can be felt in her work. By painting about the things she went through, Emma simultaneously contends with the past while carving out a place for her in the future, in the immortal canon of myth.

With a twinkle in her eye as she reminisced over Justine’s dance shoes, Emma said, “And she was really talented you know… I’m sure it’s boring me going on and on about her, but I don’t care. If I keep talking about her, then maybe more people will talk about this sort of thing or feel less alone or be less judgmental… Anyway, she was very talented.” She moved with the purpose of a mountain and the lightness of a feather. But she got bullied by envious peers. This perhaps explains why Emma feels so strongly about the bullying she had to deal with during art school as it’s an excruciating reminder of what contributed to Justine’s downfall. Especially when the art world is so rife with it. Her voice leaden with indignation, she said, “Too much of the time artists are hurting each other, slandering each other, lying, and being jealous – that suddenly doesn’t make you talented. I gather some people think that gossip is important to the art world as a tool to manoeuvre the scene. I think that’s BS.”

I don’t have to tell you twice all that’s wrong with the art world; institutional politics, two-bit practitioners abusing their platform, vitriolic competition, etc. This scene is governed by absurd rules that seem alien to reality and is inhabited by all kinds of people who are in it for manifold reasons. Some are privileged, some are spurred by experimentation, some want to make it big, some want to squash others, there are those who want to make a difference existing alongside those who want things to stay as they are, and many are trying to find themselves within this world or a world within themselves. Regardless of your provenance or purpose, if you can acknowledge the shortcomings of this scene while striving to do the best you can with the cards dealt you, staying true to your craft while doing right by those around you, there’s an undeniably magical music in this sphere. It reverberates off walls, resonates from plinths, vibrates through hanging systems - hypnotising every ear that’s open to its sweet harmony.

Right before Emma moved to the UK, Vancouver was being flambéed by a heatwave that made the mercury soar higher than in Abu Dhabi. The painting she was working on at the time was is this strange and joyous scene of a family around a dinner table, rendered in deep shades of burgundy and maroon pulsing against the cream of their skin. From the cramped composition – people and plates confined within the tight frame – to the figures sucking the marrow out of the bones leftover from dinner, there’s something very wholesomely working-class about this painting. Aptly titled Bone suckers, they wear eager and ghostly smiles. While working on it, it had become so hot that the oil paint was melting off the canvas. Pouring sweat, Emma simultaneously felt like she was melting. Through this liquefied union, she felt at one with her practice. “Or maybe I was just high from the heat…” she jokes. “But I felt a part of it, you know?” Sometimes she longs for this moment of poetic assimilation, even though she admits to becoming a much better painter since.

“So this notion of time is quite funny,” she goes on, “you could long for a time that maybe wasn’t that great, you just want to think that it was. But then also I think I live in the future a bit too much.” In her eyes was a wistful look of the un-happened. “I just hope that there’s a legacy here that can matter and tell a story and help people feel something.”

She also thinks often about where her work will end up and the spaces it’ll inhabit. People have often asked to buy her work but she’s felt unready to sell them. It doesn’t come from a place of pickiness or egotism; she simply wants to give her work the opportunity it deserve to have the strongest impact. The correct context where it’ll be seen by the people who need to see it most. Some collectors will display their acquisitions while others will stuff it in a vault somewhere. “It sounds lame,” she says wryly, “but I sometimes see these paintings as kind of my children. And obviously they’re not, but I think it’s important where they’re going to end up.”

There’s an impression of Emma that still hasn’t left me now as I finish writing this almost a month after our conversation; that of a person supremely dedicated to her work. Without a barrier between her life and her art, both imitate each other. She carries herself with a conviction that’s devoid of conceit, while extending the same kindness to her craft that she graces to others. With first-hand experience of being engulfed by the darkness, through her work she tends to a small and comforting light for those who might find themselves similarly lost.