This is the third so-termed 'Closing notes', but is different inasmuch as it's also concluding comment, albeit of a project that is at the before stage of the project proper. The fact that I've been working with an idea of future findings of a DNA Ancestry test – 19th July, is the date of the workshop where the project's participants receive their results, my own included – without having very much idea of what to expect, has in a sense been quite liberating. The project has so far drifted, therefore, from a relatively obvious starting-point of family photos to a more conceptual idea of microbiological cells, of which their content is increasingly fragmented text that had beforehand transcribed speech. As the drawing process develops, the use of coffee-staining degrades the hand-written ink text and, analogously, mutates. I've adopted this process – like the character M.'s adoption of family photos in the project's fictional narrative in the project's Page 1 – over just two states of the drawing, yet this present Page 3 already shows the text as quite abstracted. Its layout, between details of the drawing's visual cells – as I'm proposing – and back to the figural images that the texts initially referenced, have both an elliptical sense and, if it's not too far stretching the point, a symbiotic sense. In Page 2 I reference Deleuze, who had cited the painter Francis Bacon, on spasm that occurs centrifugally; a kind of dynamic movement on the spot. Apart from what I think this reference suggests of how the visual-material work's content relates elliptically back on itself, there has been the experimentation with the Research Catalogue's template, especially where, when the reader clicks on 'Closing notes', they are taken back to below the opening introductory section of each of the pages. I'm hoping, however, that the drifting of content between creative writing, visualisation, academic writing, and oscillation between text and the idea of microbiological cells,is possible on the basis that not only is the content of the project at this stage relatively open-ended research, but that the ambiguities of the content are necessarily so, because I have as yet no clear idea of what the DNA Ancestry findings will tell me or how they will look.
This adopted great-aunt was in a sense a book-end to this before-stage project. She was solitary in the photo, separated by the swathe of liquid coffee that had deleted whoever may have provided a link between her and M's adopted father, yet present, nonetheless. (While swathe is not the correct term for the coffee spill, its meaning as binding or bandage, by chance, is a not-inappropriate analogy.) To pick up on the termites reference, at this precariously late date in the project, which are social insects that live in great colonies, the great-aunt was in a sense a woodworm; a not exactly solitary but certainly less social species of beetle. Human life, M. considered, was of course industrious in all kinds of beneficial ways, but could leave untold problems in its wake. Each of us is an emissary of such good and bad. As a book-end, the great-aunt would at-once boulster the family and, following M.'s imaginative reasoning, eat away at it, much in the form by which her coming in as an afterthought at this Postcript stage both pulls the content of Page 1 of the project through to the end, and eclipses the development of this Page 3 of the project in terms of the oscillating microbiological cellular and textual focus. If this sounds uncharitable towards the lady, one must remember that this entire project is artifice, and its referenced human family is not so much represented as presented, newly, through and as an image in and as a visual-material medium, and a fictional characterisation in and through text.
Artistic research is by nature incomplete, as is the mutation of microbiological cells in and as their community. While the idea of community has been referenced in Page 2 in the context of the microbiome (Ball, 2020, 140), Ball (2020, p.183) says of the inherent 'cleverness' of all cells': 'That cleverness depends on being responsive to their neighbours and their environment, attuning their state to the demands of the moment'. This project has involved suggesting, developing and tracing an analogy between micro-cellular biology and drawing-based practice that's been exploring a DNA ancestry context, the latter of which is also based on the scrutiny of cells' behaviour. I use the present-perfect tense because the project is nearly finished, at least in terms of its exposition in this format. While the research continues, it concludes in and as its present format, at least for the time-being.
Ball (2020, p.199/200) also refers to 'chimeras' in the context of cells that have more than one genotype: 'Chimeras are simply another kind of diverse yet harmonious cell community'. Can I map this idea of cell chimeras with the diversity through and as which the present project has unfolded? In terms of its visual-material and conceptual diversity, the project has ranged between literary fiction, an author's voice and his reporting on the involvement of a fictional other, figural drawing on cardboard, some use of the warping of the latter's corrugation, coffee-staining, hand-written annotations, the latter's enunciation through speech, typed transcription of annotation and transcribed speech, video, visual-material spin-offs from a large drawing that's at this moment still in progress, and some reading in the context of human orgins and human cellular structure. Apart from how such a range of media has been determined by the project's brief of considering the question of ancestry before receiving knowledge of my own DNA sample, and the inherent ambiguity in this, the project is held together by the format of its present mode of presentation, the Research Catalogue, however diverse may be the formatting opportunities within the RC as a generic template.
Fig 42a/b: Sketch of family members, white and black crayon. Ink, coffee, crayon on paper, 29.5cm x 21cm, attributed to M + Great-aunt image, 40 x 49.5cm, attributed to M.
M. imagined that this figure with a very upright gait had been sporty in her day, but in later life might have developed back problems that left her stooped; spinal degeneration that serves to bring many of us that much closer to the ground and relationship to our four-legged ancestral primates.
There is a sole remaining partly visible figure spaced standing to the right of the married couple first shown Figure 3, Page 1, that M. had still not placed. After some comparison between photos he decided to associate this woman with his adopted father's family, perhaps an aunty of his father, in which case she would have been an adopted great-aunt to him. The woman's slimness may have been a trait that complemented his adopted father's jagged features. He played with the idea of this woman as a spark, a catalyst, in the family. How would the spark come through? In the image's formal and conceptual implosition. She was perhaps the younger grand-daughter of the figure M. had claimed was his adopted great-grandmother – although there need be no perhaps about it, as these were M.'s fanciful choices from an otherwise anonymous cohort, Figure 42a/b.
I've already made reference to termites (Page 1, Intervention 3, 10 July), due to these insects' symbiotic relationship between the food that they eat, excrete, and re-injest via fungi. While termites are found in tropical climates, woodworm is common for its infiltration of wood in temperate climates, albeit more discreetly invasive than termites. While the book-ends that support my books may not be a type of wood that attracts woodworm, symbolically this object may represent the beetles' host.
Coincidentally, as I write this I'm suffering from a prolapsed disc, causing me the painful feeling of misalignment of the vertebrae and resulting in a lopsided gait, which is a form of degeneration. Whether, over time, this will result in myself declining closer to the ground, or will prove to be an inherited family trait, I also don't yet know. (Interestingly, when I'm on all-fours I don't feel the back pain.)
While book-ends are necessarily inflexible, their weight-bearing capacity is askance to the weighted objects, the books, that they support. The cultivation of knowledge from books might be substituted, in the wedding drawing, Figure 42a, by the distance that the coffee-staining has designated between the young married couple and the figure whom M. has construed as being the bridegroom's aunty, or his adopted great-aunt. The coffee-staining may be considered a swathe of knowledge, therefore, that books conventionally provide but is in this case missing except in terms of their aid to subjective interpretation, the latter of which has been the purpose of the present project in the context of before knowledge of my ancestry, Figure 43. The analogy of the great-aunt to book-end is not after all inappropriate to the latter's uprightness and its susceptibility to certain microbioligical conditions, just as the human body is also susceptible to natural organic processes that may also have been genetically inherited.
Fig 41: Cellular Community second state of drawing. Coffee staining, ink, acrylic, attached filing cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, 100 x 120cm © Michael Croft
The Cell Community drawing shown in Chapter 2 has now been re-stained with coffee. Much of the ink text on the second and left-hand of each pair of filing cards has disappeared, leaving just short fragments of remaining relevance. Of such fragments that do remain, some of them reference several of the members of M.'s adopted family, the narrative of which is developed in Chapter 1.
Fig 43: The Great-aunt image, Figure 42b, digitally collaged onto the spine of the book-end. Dimensions variable © Michael Croft 2023
Grandfather – moth...
descendent of Akha
S. E. As...
Denisovan – sister
humans behind hy...a
as scavengers
M.'s working from a photo of his adopted father was drawn and formed as a rocky promontory, suggested, paradoxically, by the liquid staining of coffee poured onto porous corrugated cardboard. Terrain had been an operative word.
M.'s adopted mother was a languisher – to coin a term – but a big presence in her terrain, and having inherited the genetic trait of roundness.Perhaps unfair on her, and of course bizarre in relation to the aforementioned idea of presence, but Momrey had also been thinking termites; an animal, little more than an organoid, that ingests fungi that is defecated and re-injested as part of an organic self-perpetuating cycle.
While M.'s adopted father had, through his portayal of him, conveyed and passed on the phenotype gene of jaggedness, his mother, on her side, had passed on that of roundness. However, both traits had been determined by M's drawing style for the set of figures in relation to suggestions implicit in the photographs from which he was working.
M.'s adopted grandfather, mother's side, he had decided, had descended from a Southeast Asian hill tribe, inferring possible Denisovan, different from Neanderthal, ancestry. There was the granfather's dog too, which had recalled to momrey's mind the author Calasso's (2021, pp.136-8) discussion of earliest human origin behind the hyena as scavenger.