Diedrick Brackens, they spring from the embers of my mouth, 2019

Rujeko Hockley: We are looking at a woven work, made of cotton yarn. Diedrick Brackens is a textile artist who creates his own weavings on a loom in his studio. He creates his own algorithms for the weavings, based on the outcomes in terms of color, in terms of form that he is interested in achieving.

The piece is an abstraction that is also a self-portrait. It is based on personalized DNA reports of Brackens's genetic ancestry, which he turned into a pattern to make the textile from. So, it's simultaneously telling us everything about him, his genetic makeup, turning his DNA, his ancestry, the portions of his ancestry that are from X part of the world, X ethnicity, X percentage, and turning it into something that is no longer legible through that lens, but still is obviously about him very directly.

I think that is an intentional choice to both reiterate the abstraction that is both DNA, the information that we receive from these send away for your ancestry kits, and then also even just the idea of ancestry, of inheritance, of what comes to us from the past, how much we can ever know or not know about even our parents. But also of course our grandparents, our great-grandparents, our ancestors that we have never met and will never know even their names.