Cassandra Voices

Tag: Musician of the Month

  • Musician of the Month: Giulia Gallina

    Music is a language and languages are musical. My life has always been about that: an exploration of these two elements and how they are deeply connected and influenced by one another: music and languages perpetually coexisting in balance. 

    I grew up in Milan, Italy, and as a child I remember constantly being exposed to classical music: my parents got me a piano and arranged a teacher when I was six; I was then sent to music school to learn violin and sang in the La Scala children’s choir.

    That went on until I realized that I preferred to play and sing my own compositions having become curious about other genres.

    I was always attracted by introspective and melancholic yet dreamy melodies, which reflects a part of my character. Although I can’t recall what came first in my life – the gloomy piano composers or a contemplative, silent nature.

    In contrast, another part of my musical formation was deeply influenced by electro, new wave and indie music, which turned me into a devotee of underground clubbing back in the Milanese period, and then Birmingham (!), and later on – when I moved to Lisbon I started to work as a DJ, which went on for quite a few years.

    DJ Cat Noir.

    In the meantime, I managed to find similarities between synchronizing different beats while spinning records at night, and simultaneously listening to one language and translating into another when working as an interpreter during the day; in a way it all made sense, except the lack of sleep.

    However, I felt like I had space for more. As soon as I arrived in Lisbon, I enrolled in the city Music Academy to take up the piano again. Soon afterwards I joined the band The Loafing Heroes to play concertina.

    With Barholomew Ryan of the Loafing Heroes.

    The idea of wandering and loafing in slowness in the fashion of French flâneurs always appealed to me, and I have remained a member of this morphing, dream-folk collective for the past seven years.. Along the way, I have added the autoharp, keyboard, vocals and percussion to the mixture

    I never imagined focusing on a single activity in life, as our society often suggests , or narrowing down my field of interests. At times I struggle when friends or family look askance at this way of being, but I try to listen to an inner voice, which is always whispering in my ear, not to surrender, and follow my instincts in calm or stormy weather, as the time we are given in life is too short to do otherwise.

    I believe human nature needs more sources of inspiration and these can come in many different forms.

    For example, without traveling far and or to different places outside the culture that I grew up in, there would hardly be any music in my life (or languages, for that matter).

    The simple act of moving from one place to another, getting out of our usual space and time conceptions, leaving aside our constructed identities and comfort zones for a while and experiencing alterity or otherness, makes us see reality in different ways and leaves us open to unexplored fields of imagination and art.

    We are often held back by our holding blindly on to assumptions about reality. In many cases, it is these uninspected assumptions which are the root cause of our living in a painful state of perpetual contraction, of fear.

    It is not only Indian music that inspired my spirit and techniques, but the experience of India itself (in the day-to-day living and travelling with its smells, sounds and images); it is not only traveling around Greece that influenced the way I compose but also embracing Greek poets through the ancient and modern Greek languages, recalling the myths and traditions of their soil, feeling a sense of wholeness and synthesis in the elements; then everything becomes undivided and starts revealing in an uncontaminated way, in the form of inspiration.

    That is how my recent project Storm Factory was born, which is a duo with the Portuguese musician Rui Maia.

    The idea was to develop a new aesthetic path from the fusion of my neoclassic and minimalist piano compositions with Rui’s experimental and ambient electronics.

    It is a dialogue between different universes, the search for a dreamy and cinematic soundscape where a sensory piano inspired by sea travels and ancient myths encounters a full set of industrial and unsettling sounds.

    Aesthetically reframed objects and materials come together as with completing a puzzle, drawn by the noises of cities, factories, people, water, abandoned houses and crushed leaves.

    Storm Factory. Image by Hugo Santos.

    Most of these piano compositions were born during the first lockdown, when I also started painting and longing for the places I still hadn’t been to.

    My CoronaCity, 2020.

    This yearning for places that I couldn’t travel to led me to come up with another project called Zephiro. It is a podcast that I decided to create, produce and release by myself.

    It is about travel literature and contains original music and sound effects, which I capture with special field recording equipment.

    In each episode I talk about a travel book that inspired me and that can motivate people to read and travel. The book selection is made according to the following criteria: alternative ways of traveling; spirit of adventure; inner transformation of the traveller; and getting out of their own comfort zone.

    The music component of the podcast is of great importance, as I composed ad hoc music for each episode which is inspired by the countries and characters appearing in the story. The sound design is specifically forged to accompany the travels to help create a unique listening experience.

    Zephiro. Design by Hugo Santos.

    In this period, I also dedicated a lot of time to meditation, to the understanding that all the activity of our minds is not who and what we think we are. It is tragic how we are taught since the beginning of our lives to identify with the activity of our minds, our thoughts and feelings, their related turmoil.

    It is important for me to get a sense of the space within which all this activity is taking place and recognize the silence in which all our inner sounds can arise.

    Fernando Pessoa’s said: ‘my language is my homeland.’ I feel the same about my mother tongue of Italian, and also about music. I bring these with me anywhere I go, like rivers flowing in an eternal, sacred space that mean I only very rarely feel lonely.

    Morocco. Image: Hugo Santos.

    Feature Image by Hugo Santos.

    Links to Projects

    The Loafing Heroes

    Zephiro

    Storm Factory

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gtK5-YWwBE&feature=youtu.be

  • Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    By February 15th there was a scent of danger in Bull Moose’s nostrils. Discussing which Democrat candidate would take on Donald Trump – would Mike Bloomberg have beaten Trump? – he brought our attention to coronavirus, a new viral danger emanating from China, which seemed quite exotic at that point.

    Coronavirus might be the trigger to collapse this deck of cards. How soon? Probably by April, maybe May. The virus is expected to peak around April, but by then the quarterly earnings will have been impacted.

    Should most of us in the U.S. be afraid of Coronavirus? It depends. If you’re healthy and don’t work in healthcare you’ve little to worry about. Based on the limited information we can glean from the Chinese news bubble, people with an otherwise healthy immune system, who are not regularly exposed to the virus, can rest easy. Apparently it is doctors, the elderly and other vulnerable categories who are susceptible to infection.

    But that won’t stop many of us from cancelling cruise ship vacations, holidays to Asia, and even overseas trips to trade fairs. It will also impact global supply chains, which rely heavily on China. All this means lost revenue, which will hit the markets once results first show up on balance sheets in April.

    The length of this market downturn will ultimately decide November’s election result.

    Meanwhile in Ireland, Frank Armstrong was contemplating a ‘political earthquake’ in advance of February’s Irish General Election, with Sinn Féin predicted to become the largest party in the Dáil chamber for the first time. He also charted the emergence of the far right in Ireland.

    For the moment opposition to the centre-right mainstream of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is coming from the left, responding in particular to an ongoing Housing Crisis. But Ireland is not immune from the wave of identity politics sweeping far-right Populists into power elsewhere.

    Another recession might easily trigger far-right Populism within the existing framework, bringing together an unholy trinity, seen elsewhere, of xenophobia – including opposition to E.U. membership – climate change denial and opposition to abortion services.

    Elsewhere, Caroline Flack’s untimely death in February prompted consideration by Sarah Hamilton of the shocking grief caused by someone taking their own life.

    Caroline Flack.

    It is a natural reaction for us to want to cast blame somewhere. We point the finger at nameless, faceless entities manifesting greater evil than we would ever be capable of – whether trolls, social media or the tabloids. We assure ourselves these remote actors are the true killers.

    The hardest thing I have ever had to learn – one I am still struggling to get my head around – is that with suicide, we never fully know.

    February was a major month in our music coverage. First, we had renowned fiddler Musician of the Month, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh discussing his forthcoming duo album with Dan Trueman called ‘the Fate of Bones’, that would feature his 10-string hardanger d’amore fiddle and a fascinating collaboration with graphic designer Rossi McAuley.

    Then Vincent Dermody clairvoyantly discussed the huge challenges facing musicians in Ireland in a piece entitled: Almost Nobody Speaks For Musicians Anymore.

    Centuries of suffering and persecution of people on this island become a footnote to the realignment of power structures, our identity shrouded in myth and broad sweeps, as bit-part actors in nearly a millennium of recent existence. And I think, an internal struggle between our natural impulses as sardonic inhabitants of a dark, wet and green North Atlantic island.

    The coming wave can be extrapolated to a similar battle in the area of artistic self-expression that has been raging for most of our history. What do we value about ourselves and how should we express that in the public sphere? Is society thriving? If not, then am I hearing this reality represented in the everyday art that I encounter?

    Live Music in Dame Street, Dublin, October 2019. Pic Daniele Idini

    Paul Gilgunn was also contemplating the challenges involved in creation in the digital era. Thus:

    In an attention economy devised to distract and occupy consciousness, the exponential flow of information generates continual flux in its wake.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    There was also an essay by electro-acoustic composer Roger Doyle who charted his journey into experimental music in A Composer’s Story.

    Young peoples’ lives become filled with music on records, video, in films, on radio and TV, during Saturday nights, in supermarkets, in amusement arcades, on the streets and in concerts. Culturally exploded thus, they sit down to Mr. Beethoven and wonder what on earth this glaring composer from the distant past has to do with the rhythms they feel and the harmonies they hear.

    In his Public Intellectual Series in February David Langwallner’s explored the legacy of Christopher Hitchens, who he once encountered:

    I had a brief encounter with the man himself one enchanting and admittedly drunken evening. Being then youthful I was somewhat dazzled by his presence, yet more so when the bill for the wine and cognac arrived.

    I found Christopher Hitchens almost preternaturally eloquent, even when plastered. Industrial quantities of booze only seemed to inspire him to new heights, as it does many artists. Nonetheless, he was fortunate to have the constitution of an ox – a unique case and liver to boot. Predictably, it was the cigarettes that killed him in the end.

    David Langwallner clearly got around as evidenced by another treatment of Samuel Beckett, who he also encountered:

    I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.

    Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.

    That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’s award-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.

    Ronan Sheehan also drew on personal recollections in his review of Frank Connolly’s novel A Conspiracy of Lies based around the events of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings in 1974.

    Dublin and Monaghan people remember where they were on the 17th May 1974, the day three bombs exploded in Dublin and one in Monaghan. A UCD undergraduate at the time, I was in the library in Belfield when news of the bombs in Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street came through.

    We were shocked. Some rushed from the library. Others, myself included, obeyed a caution from the librarian to stay put. My father’s office at 1 Clare Street faced onto South Leinster Street. When eventually I reached my mother by telephone, I learned he was OK. The blast had smashed all the windows in his office and knocked him over. Otherwise, he was unhurt.

    Image courtesy of Dublin City Public Libraries.

    One of the most amusing articles we have ever published came from Bob Quinn that month in his account of how one summer night in 1956 Gene Shepherd invited his listeners to conspire with him in inventing a book which actually did not exist.

    We also began to cover unfolding events in Lebanon through our correspondent there Luke FitzHerbert as protestors took to the streets to block a key parliamentary vote and bank ceased to issue dollars.

    There was also coverage of rugby from Frank Armstrong, who looked forward to the guilty pleasure of the Four Provinces of Ireland coming together to form the national team:

    I yearn for Six Nations matches at this time of year. Despite my worthier self, I cannot take my eyes off a psychological drama and physical spectacle offering respite from interminable winter.

    The violence is terrible, but it seems life-affirming that these specimens can, for the most part, withstand the battering. At its best, it conveys life-in-action, a primal dance and irrepressible human spirit.

    In what was a frenetic month for Cassandra Voices there also fiction form Daniel Wade, whose Heart of the City evokes the unmistakable atmosphere of Dublin city:

    On O’ Connell Street, rush-hour crowds pitch and roll at traffic lights. She ignores seagulls screeching from the boardwalk, convoys of buses and LUAS clangs, Deliveroo cyclists dodging cycle-lanes, bouncers invigilating in doorways, the fluorescent glare from Supermac’s, haggard junkies lurching between double-yellows and taxi ranks. Under the GPO’s bullet-bejewelled portico, she spots a young girl huddled in a sleeping bag, forlornly holding out a styrofoam cup like an offering. Homeless in her hometown. She leans and drops a few coins in the cup, then keeps on walking, barely hearing the weary “Ah, thanks, Love” the girl murmurs after her. Two guards turn to watch her pass. They notice her scar, but she ignores them. Their high-vis jackets sting her eyes.

    And from Gary Grace, whose Synapse Fire contemplates the excesses of a misspent youth.

    One of the main things I characterize my misspent youth by, is a knack for exploiting the trust my middle-class parents misplaced in me. At seventeen, I was too old to be dragged along with them on what seemed like monthly getaways, but too young to exercise any degree of responsibility or restraint. My folks had a mobile home near Ballymoney beach, which had hosted many a night of debauchery for my older brother and his cronies. He was away in Amsterdam, so I’d decided it was my turn. That bank holiday weekend, I had access to a car, three malleable mates and in the palm of my hand, an assortment of different colored pills.

    There was also poetry from Lynn Caldwell, ‘Holding Velum to the Light’

    And from Brendan McCormack ‘omeros is unforgivable’, and ‘midnight in the soupcans of desire.’

    As well ‘Poem Written in Old Age’ by David Hillman:

    The light that streams across the universe
    Brings evidence of other worlds than ours
    Where midst the flux of fields and particles
    Eternal wisdom older than the stars
    Unweaves her web of possibilities
    The patterner experiments and plays.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

  • Musician of the Month: Maija Sofia

    “It was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it and walk through.”

    Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

      

    I’m going to start with a secret: I haven’t written a single good song since last August. It was the night after the sudden death of one of my favourite songwriters in the world, and I had spent the whole day writing an obituary. The summer had passed me by in a long, slow unshakeable depression, I was reeling from one too many painful happenings, and my desire to stare at the ceiling alone and cry and do nothing had far-overpowered any constructive desire to write.

    Then, one hot night in August I was dog-sitting alone in an echoey, affluent house in Rathmines. The lights kept flickering off and the dogs kept barking at vague invisible things and I was on edge and jittery. To distract myself, I sat down at a plastic toy-keyboard in the kitchen and my first song in months fell fully-formed out of my hands. I played it over and over again and made a rough recording on my phone. The next day I walked around in the sun listening to the song over and over to remind myself that there is something in me, despite everything, that comes out when I least expect it, and gives me a song.

    Ever since my album came out last November, I’ve been asked to talk about songs almost constantly – how I write them, why I write them, songs that I like, songs that have been important to me – and the more I have found myself trying to talk about songs, the more I become convinced that to talk too much about songs, to unpick them too delicately, is to do them a great disservice. The whole point of making a song is to evoke the strangeness that occurs when the right words are put to the right chords and something that cannot be addressed in everyday speech is expressed. I’m talking about good songs, there are plenty of dreadful songs out there that evoke nothing but the need to immediately switch it off.

    I’m suspicious about people who talk about songwriting like it’s a day job, like it’s a tap that can be turned on at will and new words and melodies will flow out in abundance. I secretly think the people who work in this way rarely produce anything good. Maybe I’m jealous; if I sit down with the intention to write a new song, it won’t work, whatever I write will feel forced and boring and I’ll begin to convince myself I’ve lost the ability to do it. The truth I have had to accept is that if I knew how to write songs, if I knew how a song worked, I’d do it far more often. That said, there are some things that I do know.

    Firstly, I know that it is very important to not let your ‘self’ get in the way of the work. In my experience, a good song can only be written after you’ve successfully gotten yourself out of the way. You have to try and accept that you are a conduit for the work and that the work is not you, it just travels through you. This is infuriating because we live in a world that measures our human worth against our capacity to produce. I think in order to write well you have to discard any sense of your art being a reflection of you – that way you can forgive yourself for the bad work, and also not let the good work go to your head too much.

    A good song will be unshadowed by your intention or personality and will just be a mystery that reveals bit by bit itself over time, until months later will you realise – oh yes, that’s what that was about. I think I succeed to do this every ten songs or so, but it’s also important to write nine bad songs in order to really recognise a good one when it arrives.

    Secondly, I know that in order to write good songs you have to truly love songs. This is obvious, but I think I started writing songs because as long as I can remember I have loved songs more than anything.

    I recently read Mary Gaitskill’s strange and excellent novel Veronica, near the start, the pretty – dislikeable – protagonist Alison describes the want to live inside of music. To live her life as though inside of a song. She doesn’t explain quite what she means by this, but reading it, I thought, oh yes, I know. I think I’ve spent my whole life looking for ways to live inside of songs, I have an obsessive streak, an inability to ever do things gently, and when I find a new song I love I want to be folded up and made small enough to be held inside it.

    I think this kind of obsession is a bad and nauseating trait to possess in most aspects of life, but very necessary for the writing of songs. I know the difference between a good song and bad one because when I write a bad one it feels flat and rolled out and beige, but when I write a good one it feels like a full and elaborate structure, colourful and strong enough to hold me inside for days while I work the words out.

    Thirdly, when I am really stuck and feeling dreadful, I think going for a long walk, doing some physical work in the garden or having a blisteringly hot shower sometimes helps.

    Finally, I have two things I remind myself of when I’m in long phases like this one in which I haven’t written a good song in several months and it’s started to wear down my confidence in my ability. They are, firstly – that thinking your work uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism and a self-indulgence best to be avoided, and secondly, that you always think you’ll never write again, but you always, eventually, inevitably do write again.

     

    For more on Maija Sofia’s work see:

    Bandcamp: https://maijasofia.bandcamp.com/album/bath-time

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maijasofiamusic/

    Instagram: @maijasofiamakela

    Twitter: @maija_sofia

  • Musician of the Month: Judith Ring

    Listening is a powerful skill. It’s one of the most important things you can learn in life. There are many different ways to listen and many different things to listen to, such as music, thoughts, emotions, facts, and opinions. For as long as I can remember I’ve always been trying to listen just that little bit closer.

    I developed a hyper-awareness of sound in particular during my first years of piano tuition. One of my teachers was always playing random pieces of music off the top of her head as I arrived for my lesson. I loved to hear her play like this and longed to be able to do the same. I quickly realised that it was possible to play all the popular songs of the day just by sitting down and listening. The most important lesson I ever learnt and have never forgotten was when I was about 11 years old.

    I brought a piece of music on cassette tape to my lesson for the same teacher to listen to and teach me. It may have been Bohemian Rhapsody or some other song with an epic piano part. She had a quick listen and told me to go home and figure it out for myself. This baffled me at first but I thought I’d give it a try. I went home and listened, and then really listened, and I figured out how to play the piece… note for note. What a revelation! From then on I took on everything from Billy Joel to Guns and Roses and became obsessed with learning these piano parts exactly as they were played on the recording. I didn’t just play something similar, I had to have every note correct.

    As a teenager I had a deep attachment to the piano and had a pact with myself that I had to play every day or the spell would be broken. Even playing just a few notes would suffice. I generally practiced for a couple of hours every day and even more once I got to university. Piano was a massive part of my life. I also drew a lot and developed a love of black and white photography, so between art, photography and music I didn’t have much time for anything else. I was lucky that I went to a school that somehow allowed me to focus on all three subjects. All this has continued to feed into my compositional life, which only began in my early twenties when I did a Master’s in Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (graduating class of 2000).

    Having broken the piano spell and replaced it with electronic music I quickly turned my attention to found sounds and musique concrète. Using sounds from everyday life to create vast soundscapes further broadened and deepened my listening experience. Every sound around me became music! Sounds that other people tried to block out while going about their daily business became the building blocks of my compositions. Being able to transform them even further through various electronic processes was mind-blowing to me and incredibly exciting.

    For many years I travelled around with a portable minidisc recorder and a small microphone recording anything and everything of interest. Machinery and transport fascinated me the most, especially when I started to pull these sounds apart to see what they would reveal. Electronic music opened my ears to so many incredible compositional possibilities during that time. The idea of sculpting and shaping sounds that had never been heard before was infinitely satisfying.

    In a world where there are so many types of music and ways of approaching the arrangement of sonic elements in time, it has always been a challenge to come up with fresh ideas. Classical music was built on a very specific musical language. Composers who understood the power of this language and how to manipulate it most effectively managed to develop their own voice and have stood the test of time. These rules began to be broken down and abandoned at the beginning of the twentieth century. The strict rules of harmony and counterpoint were challenged and new ideas and concepts were introduced. From then on it was a free-for-all to some extent and now you can literally write whatever you want.

    This makes things more challenging in many ways as you have nothing to hold on to. You can derive ideas from other works of course but creating a unique soundworld is very ambitious.

    Delving into the world of musique concrète gave me a very important and lifelong obsession with timbre. Through working with found sounds I started to explore acoustic instruments for their sonic possibilities. Over the years I have collaborated very closely with professional musicians to explore their instruments and listen deeply to the intricacies of timbre that can be drawn from them.

    Through the use of microphones I have built large libraries of sounds from every instrumentalist I have worked with and have explored their timbre even more by layering recordings of certain sounds together to make delicious textures. By using recordings you can enhance even the tiniest sound just by amplifying it within the mix to give you almost a macro-engagement with sound. This process became the basis of a PhD in composition that I completed at the University of York in 2009.

    The endless combinations of sonic possibilities in this world will continue to inspire my life and work. Although living the life of an artist has lead me down quite an unconventional path, and can be a struggle at times, I wouldn’t change it for anything. I will continue to listen deeply and I encourage you to do the same.

     

    For more of Judith’s work see her:

    Official website: www.judithring.com

    Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/judith-ring

    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1vVA69QkacFPkOPLdiILOQ?disable_polymer=true

    Judith is currently writing pieces for flautist Lina Andonovska and drummer Matthew Jacobson’s duo
    SlapBang and a piece for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra as part of The Contemporary Music
    Centre’s composer lab.

     

  • Musician of the Month: Hilary Woods

     

    The Year Past and Ahead

    In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.

    I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’. It reminded me also of my love for sonically-heavier music.

    Through the course of writing my new record last year I studied analogue photographic processes in London. This was an enlightening experience – awakening, purifying, and sustaining. Conversations with Lasse (Marhaug) who produced the album, opened up with us bouncing ideas on developing bath times, film grain, and Japanese post-war photographic processes resulting in layered, high-contrast, noisy, black-and-white imagery.

    I was keen to achieve sonic textures on the record similar to those I was exploring in the darkroom. In this way, my journeys in both music and visuals over the past year intertwined and mirrored elements of each another.

    During a year largely spent playing catch-up and quietly rejuvenating, another formative experience was my artist residency at CAMP in the Pyrenees, France in the summer. The opportunity to work and nurture friendships with a host of positive and inspirational people – performance artists, sound artists, composers, musical thinkers, electronic producers, creators, actors, poets, playwrights and visual artists – was a pure gift.

    At high altitude we shared studio space and meals every evening, helped with each other’s projects as we listened or gave feedback, enjoyed walks and endured the heat, watched films, and shared equipment. It was a welcome respite, having worked on writing my new album in solitude up to that point for about eight months. Much of life as a solo artist is solitary, from writing to touring to persevering with it all, so it is a joy when golden social connections are cultivated beyond that space.

    I look forward to the year ahead although it will have a ferocious pace in comparison to its predecessor, with my record due for release in spring. It will feel good to share it. There is always an element of embracing the fear when releasing anything and of learning new ways to live with the vulnerability of doing so. I feel proud of the work I achieved with others in piecing it together, and the giant steps this record required me to take in its writing.

     

    For further information about Hilary’s work visit her website: http://www.hilarywoods.com

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_hilary_woods/

    Photo credit: Joshua Wright

    https://www.instagram.com/joshuajameswright/