This blood line goes all the way back to the big bang, probably. I’ve come as far as December 18, 1900, the day my Great Grandpop was born. Jure sangunis’ comprise a series of art rubbings that explore the history of my Italian heritage. 

Rubbings have been a traditional method for documenting surface textures for ages, whether the glorious Mayan rubbings of Merle Greene Robertson, or the intimate rubbings Do Ho Suh made of his apartment. Some of my favorite rubbings were made by detectives on TV when the common trope was to find clues on hotel notepads. They really got to the essence of a rubbing. To reveal knowledge of the past. The detective would rub a pencil over the surface of a hotel pad to reveal the indentation of an earlier page left by the suspect. I reveled in these detective shows excited by the content of the clues, but also the formal process of making the markings. The energy of the detective.

My rubbings begin through genealogy research to reconstruct the history of my descendants. Ruffling through layers of bureaucracy I collect the documents that will trail my blood back to the first atoms colliding. I cut birth, marriage, and death certificates into pieces and glue them into paper reliefs in the form of my ancestors. I like them. Strong topographies of paper with delineated edges that become pale landscapes or ghosts in marble quarries. In my studio the reliefs, like the stone and sculpture they reference, quickly show the wear of physics. They accumulate rips, footprints, and spills; and, finally end up lost in sediments of trash. All that remains of the paper reliefs I craft are the rubbings, the record that they existed. History is after all an incomplete truth, a fiction. 

In the rubbings my ancestors look back at me, grandmoms and shoemakers in the shadows of rubbed sculpture reliefs. Plato saw sculpture as a metaphor for dignity, a model to aspire. Time has eroded and broken them into metaphors of transition. Time has made them more Picasso than Plato. History with its winds and gravities was always moving form toward the fractured abstractions of the twentieth century whether the audience was ready for them or not. 

Thinking back to the big bang, I’ll never know why one atom went left or right, or why two collided. I don’t know why my great-grandfather left his home to come to America. No matter how much I rub only a surface of the past is revealed, enough to know it existed. Exploring the past my rubbings have become personal metaphors. Where the crayon glides without resistance I see the optimism and nurture that borne me to America in the twentieth century. Where the crayon finds resistance and impedes flow, I feel the cracks of our family psychology that also persists into the present. Through the mark making I begin to know myself better; through the intention of gesture, direction, and pressure that contends with the relief always just below the surface. I mediate between my family’s past and myself, probably.