The Last Chord

I found the piano before I found the image. It had been sitting in an abandoned hall, keys warped and missing in patches, hammers visible through gaps where the felt had rotted away. When she laid her head across the keyboard and extended her arm along the remaining keys, the image became a conversation between two things past their performance.

The light comes from a single window above and to the left, filtered through decades of grime. The exposed strings behind her head create a secondary texture that reads as dark calligraphy, an illegible score. Her hand at the far end of the keyboard is the compositional anchor, fingers curled loosely around the last intact keys.

This is the narrative centrepiece of the Portrait series. It places a person in physical contact with something decaying and finds tenderness in the ruin.