Half Waif

In May 2022, Nandi Rose was up on the ridge-line in northeastern Wyoming. The landscape was a layer cake of strata, the colors of compressed geologic time. Rose was at an artist residency, grappling with loss, and looking for answers in the sagebrush. That winter, back home in the frosted farmland of upstate New York, her life had been riddled with blows as she faced losing a family member to illness and moved through a medical recovery of her own. Now, gazing out at the wide plains, she felt the beneficence of the passing of time. I’m not a failure, she thought. I’m an ephemeral being.