Currently on view until March 31st, 2026 at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, California is artist Rachel Gregor's solo exhibition, "No Coward Soul."

Inspired by Emily Brontë’s 1846 poem No Coward Soul Is Mine, Rachel Gregor’s latest body of work explores faith without religion, resilience without certainty, and the fragile boundary between dread and hope.

In the poem, Brontë declares an unshakable, fearless belief in something eternal. Gregor holds close to that spirit, but with one significant difference: she leaves off the final words, is Mine. Where Brontë speaks with certainty, Gregor is searching. The exhibition grew out of a long winter marked by personal loss, political anxiety, relentless storms and a pervasive sense of uncertainty. Gregor found herself questioning what it even meant to make paintings when the world felt so unstable. Outside her window at night was a dense blackness, which became the starting point for her latest body of work.

The works in No Coward Soul include mixed water-based media on paper and oil paintings on linen. The subjects are close to home: self-portraits, her husband Eric, geraniums, garden gnomes and small domestic objects. Many are viewed through glass and are seen reflected in a window at night, glimpsed in a mirror, or seen beyond a pane. That layer of glass becomes both literal and symbolic: a thin barrier between interior and exterior, safety and uncertainty, the self and the world beyond.

If earlier work focused on memory and the past, this body of work asks what it means to paint from the present tense, creating visual and emotional space for reflection. In a world that feels loud, fractured, and uncertain, No Coward Soul offers a moment to pause. The darkness is acknowledged, but so is the small, persistent light within it. Rather than declaring fearless conviction, Gregor paints from a place of vulnerability in an attempt to find comfort in the shared experience of not having all the answers.