Drawn before I knew what I would come to endure, After Hours reflects the kind of exhausted awareness that arrives only when the world has gone still. It's not sadness exactly—but a kind of atmospheric solitude. A reckoning between the visible and the concealed, the self and its shadow.
Much of my work explores the ways women are conditioned to hold their pain quietly—to self-regulate, to self-edit, to protect others from their truth. In this piece, that tension lives in the shadows: the gaze that looks outward but holds something in reserve, the open shirt paired with the tightly gripped glass, the posture that feels both at ease and ready to defend.
This is a portrait of what lingers after the performance is over—after the caretaking, the presenting, the pleasing. It's a moment suspended between exhaustion and defiance, between silence and the desire to speak. A state—of being seen but not heard, of being heard but not believed—is one I return to often in my work. Here, it takes form in a woman who doesn’t need to explain herself, but invites you to sit with the tension she holds.
