I wanted the specific loneliness of being the expert everyone's waiting on — not the glamour of expertise but its weight. Dawa's hands are in the failure: pigments her predecessors gathered over decades, cracked open by avalanche while she was somewhere else. The Sherpa-Flemish fusion gave me both the high-altitude archive tradition and the Northern European pigment-obsession of the Flemish masters. Her torn coat says she didn't stop to change when news came. The copper snow leopard brooch holding it together says someone loved her once, and that love is doing practical work now. — Vesper