Vein / Vain Mapping

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VEIN Mapping / VAIN Mapping

Family Tree Installation
Art & Culture Center, Hollywood, FL

This ongoing series was first activated through playful exploration. I was toying with a microscopic camera, testing surfaces under the scope, and flippantly put the lens over the spider veins (telangiectasia) in the epidermis of my legs. This morbid curiosity led to surprising results, as the depth of color, and intricacies of the shape and terrain within my own scars revealed themselves. Markings that seemed repellant to larger society, were startlingly attractive and captivating to my eye, and resultantly, became the focus of several paintings and embroideries.

After mapping every surface mark on my own legs, I wondered what the veins of other women would look like under the lens. I subsequently asked my mother and sisters if I could photograph their telangiectasia and varicose veins, and found their markings to be entirely unique and even more exceptional than my own.

The resulting digital images were then interpreted as oil paintings on wood. Cross-sectional tree trunk slices were an ideal parallel to use as the surface for mapping the veins, as they are living elders of nature that retain a corporeal presence, and have their own distinctive markings of age and decay. Seen together, in an installation, the paintings double as representation of a family tree.

While examining and celebrating the phenomena of nature, I am re-interpreting the tradition of portraiture by taking on the microscopic rather than the historical macroscopic representation of the body. I am amplifying elements of the flesh that culturally, have been obscured, hidden, or removed, yet in time may distinguish themselves as “beauty marks.”