TR: "I made this while I was researching the work for the Frederick Douglass show at SCAD, paternal absence figured prominently in the lives of the Douglass family and led me to think about the relationship between my mother and her father and my grandfathers peripatetic life and his many absences. I had an interesting meeting at a hotel during Frieze in 2019 with the woman who manages museum acquisitions for Victoria Miro, she spoke of her own father’s time away on ships during his time in wathever military service it was and her thoughts and emotions about ships and absence further inspired the work I made that following summer. The Seatrain is one of the ships he sailed on during the war, it was created to carry tanks, innovative and crucially important at the time. The US was able to deliver tanks to Africa and it had a decisive impact on tilting the advantage to allied forces.

My grandfathers ashes are embedded in the graphite and resin used to create the image. Bone fragments get under the screen or become trapped between the squeegee and the mesh and at times create visual interruptions in the image, in this case the screen was split. Each work, though printed, is unique, since the screen is often destroyed in the process of making each work."