Since she first appeared as a student in MECA’s Graduate Studies painting program, I’ve been a huge fan of Michel Droge’s work. Her thick, hazy, metallic-seeming paintings held both darkness and light as well as anyone in the state (not named Dozier Bell). But “Hiraeth,” her short-stay exhibition of cyanotypes and embossings, Droge takes a left turn into a different medium and intention.

In an artist statement, Droge defines “hiraeth,” a Welsh term, as “a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost pieces of your past.” A year prior to when she began the work that would end up in this exhibition, Droge’s brother died of an opiate overdose. “Everything familiar had come undone. I was navigated uncharted waters,” she writes. “I began a series of prints based on the idea of unraveling an Aran sweater.”