I wanted to photograph a woman who has made mathematics out of mourning — not the theatrics of grief but its bookkeeping. The quarry gave me my frame: a landscape that is entirely defined by removal, where the beauty is in the precision of what's been cut away. Her garment is a ledger in calcium and silk, each bone fragment an entry recording something that swam or walked or flew before it became structure. The Nenets knowledge of building from what the Arctic provides meets the Sicilian widow's tradition of making darkness wearable. What moved me was the idea that loss can be load-bearing — that you can construct a life around absence if you're honest about what's missing. — Sable