These works are from a series of mixed media collages that explore ideas connecting familial lineage, motherhood, the body as landscape, memory and mortality. As a middle-aged person raising young children and navigating aging parents and grandparents, essential questions arise: what do we carry from previous generations consciously and unconsciously? What do we pass on to our children? How do we stay connected and remember family members who have passed away? What memories do we retain and which memories fade away?
Living in the era of commercial DNA testing, I began to explore my maternal and paternal DNA information along with my own. I became enthralled with investigating my family’s geographic ancestry as well as the visualization of my chromosome map. I meticulously traced this map onto vellum, using the drawing as a negative and rendering multiple black and white photograms, further abstracting an abstraction of my identity. I made gelatin plate monoprints on vellum using parts of my body to create ink impressions and stencils from fragments of family portraits, pulling multiple prints from each plate and disintegrating and degrading the images with each subsequent print into patterns resembling cellular or biologic visualizations. Some of these monoprints I used to make additional photograms, while others I kept in their original state. From this volume of photograms and prints I used fragments to create layered, dreamlike landscapes. Each collage contains snippets of facial profiles, body prints, and the DNA code from myself and my family members, aggregating into a sort of personal iconography. This process of selecting, cutting and arranging these forms has been both profoundly meditative and gratifying. In combining abstractions of my most intimate and specific imagery with classical landscape motifs, I continue to investigate the intersection of the interior and exterior, the psychological and physical.