Original Art by Kayla McCormick
Title Let Me Move In (2026)
Media Pencil, ink, digital photograph
Caption by Kayla McCormick and Christy Rentmeester
Maintaining personal health sometimes requires coming to terms with a genetic dumpster fire of ancestral health troubles. Navigating present health experiences can mean orienting oneself to a future of uncertainty about the severity of possible illnesses, while not letting prognostic anxiety undermine one’s quality of or enjoyment of life.
It’s tempting to compare one’s own health ancestry to those of friends with no major known illness or injury histories in their families. For the artist, this drawing visually enacts forward shared movement, with the sincerity and earnestness of these figures’ strivings clear in the meeting of their gazes. This drawing considers a merger of life quality over pasts and futures, a kind of equilibration of luck and of possible risks and benefits colloquially said to “run” in families.
Over life spans, our ancestral health lineages confer upon us a wide range of possible traits and their many possible freights and fates. Perhaps some of us imagine what it might be like to have a more benign family history from which to siphon, draw, and summon–with help from friends–courage and strength to propel ourselves along as much health span as our histories allow.
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