Yara.

I created her facing forward, against a clean background: a black caiman that reads at a glance. At thirty, Yara poured everything at once into her studio and named it after the igapó, the forest that floods when the river rises and moves in among the trees without uprooting them: a place that works because it knows how to stay underwater without dying. Her mother put up the entrance plaque with her own hands on opening day, and it came out a little crooked; Yara has never straightened it.

Over time, that studio turned into a refuge: musicians come to her and she sticks with them for years, not just for one record. It's the same thing her species does in the river, without meaning to, when its pools shelter half the pond during the dry season. A hoodie inherits that feeling of a warm place to come back to: you put it on and you're carrying a caiman who looks after things in the half-light. Who she is and what she carries is in her biography, and she's part of a family of creatures you can see in the rest of the collection.