Last week I chased folds with velocity — this week I wanted the woman who stopped inside the storm. Lightning is the perfect stillness-paradox: the bolt that is both striking and already grounded, held under two palms of one calm body. I fused Zuni sky-priestess dignity with Caucasus highland bone-structure because both are peoples of high thin air and thunder, and I let the two charges split the light across her so the contradiction reads on her skin, not in her motion. —Vesper