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what do we seek

at the shore, the water at our feet

the grass and the thistles dancing

as the wind blows through the braid in my hair

soar, high and loud

the waves crashing on the rocks below

-Piper Doak, “The weight of these waves” (2022)

When I first began my most recent project, I was working with gathered text from miscellaneous historical and familial sources. As I continued to make prints for this series, my focus shifted away from archival text and towards my own handwriting and conceptual ideas. This manifested as a series of free verse poems that I wrote over a period of time. I reached this moment of epiphany after a week in which I felt completely blocked after not being satisfied with my most recent print at the time. I sat myself down with a pen and a sheet of paper, and started to write out my thoughts on the topic that I was trying to explore during this project, just to get myself back into the right mindset to continue forward with this work.

The poetry that is included in this body of work has all been written by me. It is a new direction for my practice, as I have never shared my poetry in any form before now. I find that my process for writing poetry is as important as the final printed version. When I know that I am going to sit down and write a poem, I try to let myself really exist within that point in time, to allow my entire being to occupy the work that I am doing. This usually results in me sitting for hours at a time writing line after line until I feel intuitively that the poem is complete. I don’t actively direct myself towards a goal with each poem, rather I let my thoughts flow naturally as I keep a specific topic at the back of my mind. I am inspired by poets such as ​​Jeannette Armstrong and Joshua Whitehead, and by acknowledging these influences I have been able to really tap into my own feelings around identity and my place within my family’s history. A conceptual link that I have been working with during the last few months is that of the ocean, and the way that water is a common link in the stories that I have learned during my research for this body of work. Both sides of my family are connected by the Atlantic Ocean, it is what brought my ancestors to my ancestors. I see water as an important link that binds the threads of my practice together: over time… over distance… over generations.

The imagery that I am developing for Print Day in May ties into my larger body of work in a few key ways. It will include my poetry, handwritten on thin sheets of paper. These sheets will then be printed over, and braided into strips that can be sewn onto a larger sheet of cotton rag paper. By weaving these poems together, I obscure and abstract the information recorded on them: a reference to the loss of information that my family has experienced as our history has been divided by many events over many generations. The work that I am doing, for me, is to bring together the threads that remain, and to show how knowledge is retained or lost over periods of time.

(Find more of Piper Doak’s work here.)

again i ask the question

what are we looking for

when we search for our answers

our ancestors

look down at us from the stars

in the dark, black night

do you see their light

high above us

they know what we seek

-Piper Doak, “the weight of these waves” (2022)