Gretel Harrison still talks to her partner all the time.
He's there when she arrives at the office each morning, as she moves through the day, and in her room at night.
Robert Foster died 10 years ago, but his creative energy is still pulsing strong in the workshop he and Harrison set up in the early 2000s.
The interior of the Queanbeyan workshop, a Tardis-like structure fronting a quiet street in Queanbeyan's industrial precinct, is defined, first and foremost, by a jug.
It's not just any jug - many people from Canberra and most design enthusiasts will recognise the distinctive curved structure, saturated colour and pleasing ergonomic feature of the iconic FINK jug.
It's still the company's bestseller - Harrison reckons FINK + Co sells around hundreds of them a year - and was the starting point for a creative enterprise that sustained Foster, as well as Harrison and their two daughters, for 23 years.
And it has continued long after his untimely death.
The gentle and brilliant artist died suddenly and violently in a car accident on July 13, 2016. But there was never any question that his legacy and work would continue.
At the time, Foster was on his way to the coast to install a privately commissioned sculpture; as usual, the design lived largely in his head, and Harrison and the FINK team worked tirelessly in the weeks afterwards to get the sculpture finished.
And the work has continued. Harrison still runs the company, which produces Foster's signature jug, storage vessels, platters and beakers.
"I can't imagine doing anything else," Harrison says today.
"I feel him here, and I feel safe here."
She greets the larger-than-life portrait of him in the foyer every morning, and often talks to the urn containing his ashes in her bedroom.
And she keeps his aesthetic and philosophy thriving through the vast workshop he built.
On the day we visit, a staff member is handling a special charcoal edition of the signature jug, hand-hammered using the tools Foster made with his own hands and used constantly. Making things by hand was a given - it allowed him to feel the dimensions and proportions of an object.
Hammering, says Harrison, was his happy place, and the jug has hundreds of hammer marks embedded in its surface.
"Aluminium for Robbie was soft, so it allows you to have that really soft, organic kind of shapes, and that was very much a signature of his design and what he was about," she says.
In his absence, she and the dedicated FINK + Co team of seven - its members have turned over and none of the original makers still work for the company - work to reinterpret some of his designs and create new products.
"We've taken his processes and tried to use different ways of making different things, creating different tooling, but using the same visual language," she says.
Still, the jug - every one handmade - is key, and you can see it everywhere you look, a deceptively simple thing Foster created in the early 1990s for a long-gone Canberra restaurant. Republic, down by the casino, wanted some distinctive vessels, and Foster made three curved jugs by hand.
Customers very quickly began asking how they could get their hands on something similar, and FINK + Co was born.
The name, a play on "Foster Inc" with slightly ratbag connotations, quickly stuck - always as an enterprise born of collaboration. Foster set up FINK in 1993 with business partner Anthony King, an optometrist who happened to have one Gretel Harrison as a client.
It was King who set them up as a couple - they had their first date in 1995 at the Phoenix, another long-gone venue in Civic - and Harrison quickly came on board with the business.
King left after a couple of years, and Foster and Harrison ran FINK together, producing thousands of the aluminium jugs anodised in fully saturated colours, alongside lights, jewellery, cups and platters.
As an artist - he graduated from the ANU School of Art in the mid-1980s - Foster loved to collaborate, and his career was filled with mentorships, partnerships, commissions and plans.
He was also a consummate creator, a vital force in Canberra's tight-knit arts scene, which was left reeling when he died.
It was just months after his death that Harrison helped curate an exhibition of his work. Held in the foyer of what was then the ActewAGL building, the site of Ossolite, one of his signature light-based installations, it was a celebration of his life's work.
Many of the works in that show were one-off art pieces that lived in the family home. Harrison remembers gathering them up for display, a process suffused with grief and sadness.
"When I got all the work out for that exhibition, I was just bawling my eyes out, crying and crying and crying, and then I packed it all away in crates, and then I put it all away in storage," she says.
Ten years later, she decided to stage an anniversary exhibition at SevenMarks Gallery in the coastal town of Kiama, owned and run by her friends, the artists Chick Butcher and Cobi Cockburn.
Out came those works again.
"[Chick and Cobi] came up on a Sunday, and we spent the whole day looking, and I had this feeling of enlightenment - I felt so happy and so excited. It was just such a big switch from being so, so sad, to being so excited and so happy.
"I was so excited to see the work that I hadn't seen [in 10 years]."
The works are now showing at SevenMarks, alongside works by 10 contemporary artists who worked with or were inspired by Foster and his work.
They've each taken something from the FINK product range and reinterpreted it as an artwork, using finished products, raw forms and off-cuts.
It's a celebration of Foster's determination to create, with no boundaries, and a tribute to the continuing life of his work and legacy.
Harrison says it was unfathomable to close FINK once Foster died; if anything, she needed to give her grieving daughters a strong role model.
"They both have a really good work ethic because Robbie was such a hard worker as well," she says. The standing family joke was that Foster used the workshop as his second home, often returning there after dinner and bedtime at the family home in Ainslie, and working into the wee hours.
"I always feel that he's still out there looking out for us," she says.
"I'm not religious, but I still believe that there must be something. And that's why being here in the workshop, I can feel him, because he loved being here.
"He really helped a lot of people, and he didn't understand what the word no was," Harrison says.
"I've kind of got that from him. Nothing would ever get in his way of wanting to do what he wanted to do."
