Mansa.

In her story, Mansa has kept three river stones since she was four years old. She picked them out one afternoon in the dry bed of the Lotsane, in Serowe, with her grandmother Koko beside her: it took her forty minutes, she touched all of them, smelled a few, and kept the gray one with white veins, the reddish sandstone one, and a black one smooth as an egg. Koko washed them with her in a bucket and told her something Mansa still repeats: when you miss something, touch a stone; the stone doesn't move, neither do you. The stones don't appear in the portrait. She does, facing forward.

I created the portrait facing forward with a clean background: an elephant calf in the pink sweater her mother knitted for her, with nothing around to distract. The matte finish doesn't glare, so it holds up well hung across from a window or under a lamp. Mansa is part of Animal Kinhood, the series I've spent years creating, portraying dressed animals with the lives of ordinary people. This print pulls her out of her story and puts her on your wall; the rest of her life in Maun is in her biography.