I started work on Beautiful Things as a personal milestone approached. It was originally intended to mark the third year since my new life began, to be completed in October of 2024. Yet as I worked, toiling away on the minute details of the feathers, the talons and the flowers - especially the flowers - I was reminded how healing doesn't always follow the timeline we set for it. Some things take the time they need, and that’s okay.

Here Margaret has reappeared - this time soaring overhead, carrying a sprig of golden wattle. In my inquiry, I looked to the familiar iconography of the dove and olive branch and giving it a personal and local twist; Margaret and the wattle are in their place. Seen from below, she carries a sense of weightlessness, the burdens of the past now lifted - perhaps not all at once, perhaps not when expected, perhaps in their own time.

What remains is love, freedom, and peace.