“Like the rootless Burgher, Trent Walter understands his role in his print workshop as in-between and interstitial. Akin to an interpreter. Neither insider nor outsider, or perhaps both at once. Joining some of the most significant artists, poets, and writers of this century, ranging from Saidiya Hartman to Archie Moore, in this essay Walter deploys family history—with all its fundamentally impenetrable absences and fantastical yearnings—as a critical and creative method with clear applications for a studio practice.”

—Helen Hughes, Senior Lecturer, Monash University

“Weaving between familial stories and silences, Trent Walter reimagines identity formation as artistic process. As he reclaims the shifting contingencies of relatedness through lived experience, printmaking and objecthood, he encourages us to look beyond the absences of history into the ‘needs and realities of the present.’ Thuppahi is an offering: it seems to want to say here is how art can be a form of relation, how longing can be transformed into tenderness.”

—Anna Arabindan-Kesson, author of Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World