Exhibition at Health Sciences Center Pylons
August 2024 - May 2025
Groundwork began as a photographic study of the fallen, mottled fruits of
Asimina triloba: the American pawpaw. Being on the ground, as it were,
turned the project into an ecological meditation on intergenerational trauma
and the potential for future healing.
Sprawling colonies of
Asimina triloba are thriving throughout West Virginia, but surprisingly
few people in our mountain state know about the understory tree that, among
other things, helps keep hillsides and riverbanks from slipping.
Those who haven’t actually seen pawpaws may nevertheless be familiar with
them courtesy of a catchy ditty known as “The PawPaw Patch.” Both variants
of this folksong published in
Mountain Mother Goose: Child Lore of West Virginia
orient the pawpaw patch “way down yonder.” The most famous version of the song culminates
in a frenzy of picking up pawpaws and shoving them into pockets.
As we mark the 60th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty—and
are, yet again, bombarded daily with distorted narratives about our region,
histories, and peoples—it’s critical that we create opportunities to learn
how to perceive ourselves, as well as West Virginia’s diverse ecosystems,
in ways other than those prescribed by economic imperatives and extractive
capitalism. This is a key element of the groundwork undertaken in Groundwork.
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Randi Ward is a poet, translator, lyricist, and photographer from Belleville,
West Virginia. She earned her MA in Cultural Studies from the University
of the Faroe Islands and has twice won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s
Nadia Christensen Prize. Ward’s translations, writing, and photography are
used in high school and university classrooms throughout the United States
and abroad. She is a recipient of Shepherd University’s Appalachian Anthology
Photography Award, and Cornell University Library established the Randi Ward
Collection in its Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in 2015. After
returning to West Virginia, Ward founded the Parkersburg Poetry Series to
bring some of Appalachia’s best writers to Wood County, WV for free readings.
She has also served as a judge for West Virginia’s Poetry Out Loud state
finals and as a Fine Arts and Spoken Word juror for the Women of Appalachia
Project. Her work has been featured on Folk Radio UK, National Public Radio,
and PBS NewsHour.