Grow Wings My Love, Grow Wings began with grief. In 2014, Thomas-Girvan arrived at a residency at the Vermont Studio Center carrying sorrow and a need to understand absence. At a community garage sale she began collecting odd glass fragments — not yet knowing how she would use them. Eventually, they became a strange machine with a body in it: an other-worldly apparatus for safe passage.

Glass, she realised, was the perfect metaphor for the precariousness of her life — durable yet fragile, a material strengthened under intense heat. It could hold grief. This work reflects a recurring sensibility within Thomas-Girvan’s practice; an attentiveness and openness to materials and forms whose meaning is eventually revealed.