Borrowed Feathers

Borrowed Feathers is a noir-inflected portrait series that examines the friendships surrounding my late husband Tom—relationships he leaned on to borrow confidence, stability, and identity when he could not locate those qualities within himself. These works explore the emotional economies of companionship: the camouflage we wear to belong, the personas we borrow from others, and the illusions we construct to survive.

Tom was a deeply sensitive man who often depended on the strengths of those around him to assemble a version of himself he hoped the world could accept. His friendships provided warmth, validation, distraction, and escape, but they also revealed the fragility of the support he sought. In these images, animal-human hybrids become symbolic portraits of the roles people played in his life: protectors, enablers, confidants, shadows, and sometimes mirrors of his own unresolved longing.

As I stood beside him, I, too, created illusions—believing in connections that later

dissolved, interpreting loyalty where only need existed, imagining stability where there was none. This series acknowledges the narratives we both constructed and the emotional cost of sustaining them.

Each tableau—a fox in borrowed finery, a crow lingering in dim hallway light, a rabbit at a bar, a deer-woman at a night crossing—captures the atmosphere of friendships built on unspoken transactions. The noir setting mirrors the psychological terrain we navigated: smoke, secrecy, devotion, ambiguity, tenderness mixed with distortion.

Borrowed Feathers is not a condemnation of these relationships. Instead, it is an honest examination of what we borrowed, what we mistook for love, what we carried that was never ours, and what remained after the illusions burned away. It is a study of belonging, misperception, emotional exchange, and the fragile beauty of companionship in complicated lives.