Life Lines

I began this series in 2017, after coming into the possession of recent MRI scans of my brain. The scans, which I spent hours pouring over, both fascinated and horrified me. Even though I’d always known the seriousness of it, I was suddenly confronted with visual evidence of the long ago but significant brain injury I’d sustained as a baby. Around the same time, I also experienced a difficult and continuous period of profound familial loss. Both these episodes left me thinking about the body in a very different way than I had before: I became interested in the biology and physiology of our bodies and the seemingly cruel, capricious way a body can behave, vacillating between strength and fragility. I began to make drawings from the MRIs, at first visually recording the brain itself, thto understand how its structure and pathways form to activate the circumstances of the individual being we become. As the series has developed, I translated these drawings into etchings, the imagery has dissolved into abstraction to capture something more existential. Repetitive lines revealing rhythms and patterns, like conversations, to me. Ultimately, Life Lines has evolved into a visual story about connections, threading together a human body with its physical, metaphysical and interpersonal environment.