BLOODLINE no. 3 & 4 were created for the Mayor’s Reception Room at Duluth City Hall and were scheduled to be installed April 1st, but due to COVID19 the installation has been put on hold.

Epigenetics suggest that our lived experiences can modify the expression of our genes without changing the genetic code itself.

Undulating copper conduit symbolizes the bloodline, a channel of lineage. While the hanging coils suggest spiraling DNA or umbilical cords, they symbolize instead the lived experience and information that leaves and returns back to the main conduit. The prefix ‘epi’ means ‘on top of’- as in, experience is placed on top of our DNA. The experience most easily tracked scientifically is trauma. The literal and conceptual weight is evident as it builds generation after generation. The pure expression of (the first pieces in the collection that feature only) electrical wire as the coil, illustrates a complex system of energetic currents that inform our bodies, blood, and our inherited memory. The neutral colors emote differently from the bright colors, just as each of us can be impacted by different expressions of inheritance from the same or similar genes. Additional iterative pieces in the series begin to include more diverse physical expressions beyond the electrical wire that reflect positive and nourishing experiences passed through handwork traditions that I missed experiencing with my female elders.

The BLOODLINE series builds on my exploration of seeking to know my grandmothers. Both died around the time of my birth and earlier work (Blood Memory, 2018) helped me to see that they live in me, despite the fact that I never knew their life force. This idea propelled me to explore the scientific concepts of epigenetics as it relates to ancestral memory.

According to epigenetic research, scientists are learning that lived experiences build “on top” of our genes and, even without changing the core genome, trauma (in particular) can be traced to show that it impacts the way in which our traits are expressed in future generations. The mythical notions of ancestral memory beg us to recognize the spiritual perspective that every person who has come before us, in our blood line, is part of us now - in the present. Lifetimes of experience course through our veins and maternal connections are especially strong. The fact that a pregnant woman (my grandmother) carries the egg of her grand-daughter (me) in her womb, inside the growing body of her fetal-daughter (my mother) transformed my concept of how to connect with my grandmother. More over, if pattern behaviors develop generationally, and grandchildren do not have to experience a trauma to inherit trigger-responses to that trauma, how have my ancestors experiences affected me and influenced how I respond to the world? These intuitive questions have led me on a journey to try to bridge myself to the wisdom of my female elders, and to help soothe and articulate the flood of emotions that find me when I tap into my own body wisdom. They also led me to explore a part of my family history that could explain why I feel such sadness, fear, and anger - even while my own life has been one of privilege and safety.

I have spent the last six years unweaving myself and everything I know in order to find a new way forward after my body experienced a burn out. Through my art-making over the last three years I followed the threads hoping to find the source of my personal issues. The tangle web they belong to is much more extensive than I could have envisioned.

After the lynching of George Floyd in my city of Minneapolis and the events that followed, the magnitude of this task to unweave, unlearn, and relearn is exponentially greater ... and never more necessary.

I see the privilege and fragility that I learned as a white girl and woman, how my whiteness and my behaviors uphold the system even as I recognized the injustice that permeates society, even as I believed myself to be on the right side of making social change. I am also beginning to grasp how the system of white supremacy stripped me of my ability to trust my own body as it continually cried out for me to pay attention. White Americans, we owe it to ourselves and everyone else to fully examine our privilege, our biases, our behaviors, and our complacency … but also our ancestral history/memory, our role in upholding a racist society, and our own personal lived histories as they further ingrain the behaviors we perpetuate - generation after generation. This excavation is part of social change that we must initiate within ourselves.