Lineament is a study in genetics and how visible features get passed from one generation to the next.
Genetics play a huge role in our visible (and invisible) features, but so do our family relationships and local environment. These factors can affect how certain features get passed on and how some are eliminated entirely. People are generally attracted to others who look like themselves, which means that similar features are kept in the family.
“We are much more likely to fall for someone who looks like us or our opposite-sex parent. This may indicate that our incest taboos are social constructs instituted to prevent people from following their instincts.”
Brogaard, B., 2015
I am interested in the ways that genes mutate, and the effect that our environment has on our bodies and the way we change and adapt over time.
My family has long been recognised by their facial features and pointed out by strangers who have known members of my family. Therefore, I was interested in creating this work – do my family really look that similar? Why is that? What features exactly make us look alike; is it our noses, eyes, chins?
In much of my research I have found that the environment in which we live has a large effect on the way our bodies, and offspring, react to their living conditions. Our bodies evolve depending on what we need to survive. In a study co-authored by Richard E. Green, it was found that people and some species of animals who migrated to an Indonesian island called Flores, suddenly became ‘small’. Elephants as small as humans, humans as small as dogs. There is no evidence of new species or genetic mutations; scientists think it has something to do with the island itself. The elephants that became small evolved from normal sized elephants, and the humans evolved from normal sized humans (Zimmer, C, 2018).
I am influenced by the work of John Stezaker’s series Marriage, in which he collects film portraits, cuts them into pieces and matches them with other film portraits. To follow in his footsteps using a slightly different process, I photographed my extended family with a white backdrop wearing white tops at the same time of the day. I then printed these images and cut and ripped them into different shapes, then placed them side by side to make ‘new’ people. The aim of this is to show that my family looks so similar that even new people created from the existing people still look the same.
