Raised in Boston, Hughes developed an early interest in painting through the encouragement of her grandmother, an amateur artist. She earned a BFA in Painting from Boston University and later an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. Throughout her career, the landscape has remained a constant source of inspiration, from plein air painting excursions in southern France, western Ireland, and New Hampshire to the abstract visual language that defines her current work.

Hughes’ paintings are built through a process of accumulation and response. Meandering lines, layered marks, and shifting fields of color reference contour maps, topographical drawings, botanical forms, and waterways. Influenced by the hidden ecologies of urban spaces, particularly Boston’s Back Bay Fens neighborhood, her work investigates how environments are experienced, remembered, and transformed through time. The resulting compositions occupy a space between abstraction and landscape, evoking both physical terrain and internal experience.