Heritage Series I

The woodcut series by Killian Williams explores memory, heritage, and identity through deeply textured black-and-white compositions. With each stroke of the carving tool, Williams honors the visual language of rural Southern life—both historical and personal—transforming individual recollection into universal narrative. His prints evoke a sense of resilience, spiritual endurance, and the often-overlooked beauty of Black domestic and communal spaces. The intention is to immortalize the quiet, profound strength of family traditions, folklore, and generational rhythms.

Executed through relief printing, these woodcut pieces showcase the visceral texture of carved linework. The monochromatic palette enhances the emotive tension, allowing light and shadow to create both movement and memory across the compositions. Williams uses the raw, tactile nature of the woodcut to emphasize both the permanence and erosion of cultural memory.

Prints like Wedding Day and Porch elevate everyday rituals—marriage, resting, observing—as sacred acts. There is a stillness in these images that suggests dignity in the mundane.

Works like Communion and Mama depict communal moments, particularly of women gathering, preparing, and sharing wisdom across generations.

The surreal piece featuring a faceless figure engulfed in radiating light (Communion, perhaps) pushes the boundaries of memory and trauma, evoking a reckoning with unseen emotional or spiritual inheritance.

In Rain Wash and Tall Tales, architectural elements—weathered wood, porch steps, tin roofs—serve as silent witnesses to the narratives unfolding within and around them.

Williams leans heavily into contrast and repetition. Crosshatching, gouged texture, and rhythmically carved marks suggest movement, like wind through trees or the ripple of whispered stories. Figures often lack detailed faces, creating anonymity that invites viewer projection—these are not just Williams’s ancestors; they are all of ours.