Emily & Sarah Collection
- Mar 30
- 2 min read
Updated: May 26
Monday 30 March 2026
TLDR
33 hand-painted works following a lesbian couple through the quiet negotiations of a life built together: what they set aside, what compounds, and what never quite gets named
Anyone who has built a life with another person knows the version of themselves quietly retired in the process. Emily & Sarah bring that cost into sharp focus
The third collection in the 2026 STORIES series.
Emily & Sarah is the third collection in the 2026 STORIES series: 33 hand-painted works following a lesbian couple through the quiet negotiations of a life built together. Each piece is drawn and painted by hand in gouache on A5 cotton rag, then digitised and minted individually. Like Leo & Neil before it, this collection is not a love story. It is a belonging story. The difference matters.
Society does not ask openly what it costs to belong. It simply raises the price until you stop counting. Emily and Sarah are two women who have chosen each other, and in doing so have encountered the particular pressures that choice brings: the expectations of family, the compromises of visibility, the slow erosion of desire that conformity demands. This collection looks closely at what they quietly become in order to stay together, and what they set aside to stay accepted.
The cost of belonging is not unique to queer lives. Anyone who has built a life with another person knows the version of themselves that gets quietly retired in the process. What Emily and Sarah's story brings into focus is how that cost compounds: the preferences surrendered, the desires softened, the parts of self that become too complicated to maintain when belonging has a price. The 33 works trace that compounding across the full arc of their relationship, from early compromise through to the settled weight of what has been given up without ever quite being named.
Emily & Sarah sits in direct conversation with Leo & Neil: both collections ask what belonging inside a relationship costs, through different lives, different pressures, different erasures. Where Leo & Neil maps two men negotiating with each other and with everything they inherited, Emily & Sarah maps two women navigating a different set of expectations, a different erasure, the same fundamental question.
What do we surrender when we choose to be chosen? The collection asks that across 33 works and resists an easy answer.
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STORIES: Emily & Sarah is part of an ongoing 2026 STORIES series exploring intimate human experience through compressed narrative and hand-painted portraiture.