During the week we spent burying his father in early 2022, I watched my own father become the keeper of my grandfather’s memories and history. This shift happened between long strolls through deserted parks, boxes of old family photographs, and cliffs from which we stared out at distant lights. In the intervening months, I struggled to put into words the transformation I witnessed – even as I dearly wanted to transcribe it.

I eventually tried capturing those few days by revisiting some erasure poetry exercises I’d previously explored in grad school. Here, the catalog of images I’d collected on my phone during that week served as the source text from which I worked.

Pater et Filius ponders how relatives transmit memories to one another, particularly when kin pass away; it is the portrait of a parent and his child in the moments that follow the death of that parent.

Produced as the inaugural print for the Fine Press Book Association’s sustaining membership tier in an edition of 25.

2022. Gouache, water-soluble relief ink, and rubber-based ink on Hahnemühle Ingres paper. Pochoir, trace monotype, and letterpress-printed handset Van Dijck. 12” x 9”