My Constant

by Candace Garlock

My Constant, Candace Garlock and Emsley Lewis, Gel Transfers, Plaster, Wood

There are remnants of Emsley’s creative acts in my studio that bring me joy. Three feet, cast in plaster, rest side by side on a dark, wooden tree trunk disc. One is mine, full-sized, familiar in the way your own foot is familiar, except parts are chipped away. The heel and part of the arch dissolve into a dark, textured wash, like the foot is about to step into water. The other two are tiny. It is Emsley's, cast when she was a month old, before she could even hold her own head up, let alone know that her Booma would spend the rest of her life thinking about their moments together, each day.

Both feet are covered in birds. Little cherub-winged creatures with baby doll feet, blue ink and glaze, perched and mid-flight across the arches and toes. The little birds represent the real, living ones that would not stop chattering in the woods at Travelers' Rest during my residency in Lolo, Montana this spring. I filled a brand-new sketchbook with them that first week of April, before I even understood what the piece was going to become. I remember sitting outside, watching them dart between branches, taking photos and thinking: I want something of this place to sit with something of home. The sketchbook page- all that tangled blue-and-rust line work of birds caught mid-motion became the vocabulary I carried onto the feet weeks later. Every bird on that piece of wood started as a bird on that page.

Candace Garlock Sketchbook page, Open Air Residency Program, Montana, April 2026

I have always turned to birds when I am missing someone. During the pandemic, when I couldn't hold Emsley and could only press my hand to hers through a glass door, the birds at my feeder became my proxy family, each one a stand-in for someone I loved and couldn't reach. This piece has the same instinct, older and more specific now. The finches on the feet aren't abstract stand-ins this time. They are, quite literally, what surrounded me while I was five weeks away from her, at an age where she is old enough to FaceTime me herself and ask when I'm coming home.

The missing parts of my foot are not subtle, and I didn't want it to be. Since my MS diagnosis, I have had to watch my own feet just to know where they are. The nerves that automatically once told me I was on solid ground now leave gaps. I have to look at the ground  to trust my steps. That eroded heel is exactly that: a literal rendering of what my body sometimes withholds from me. But it is also the shape of what Emsley's absence does to me when I am away from her for work, for healing, for anything. A missing piece. A place I have to actively look toward, rather than simply feel.

And that is why her feet sit right next to mine. Emsley is the one who notices when I'm unsteady before I do. She reaches for my hand on uneven ground without being asked. At less than a year old,  she pressed her palm to a window to find me; now, at eight, she is somehow the one keeping watch over my footing. She is my constant, not in spite of the parts of me that go missing, but because of them. The birds cover both of our feet the same way, because I don't actually experience us as separate anymore. Her steadiness and my unsteadiness are woven into the same piece, the same flock, the same page of finches I filled in that first week away from her in April.

I don't think I'll ever finish "using up" this particular set of feelings in the studio, and I've stopped expecting to. Every time I draw a bird now, some part of me is still sitting on that sofa in 2020 looking at the birds, and some part of me is still in that Montana sketchbook, and some part of me is simply standing, a little unsteadily, a little incompletely, but standing, because Emsley is holding on.