OF KIN AND BONE

Michael Jones McKean, with assistance from Dr. Stephen Fong, Professor of Chemical and Life Science Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University, in cooperation with the Museu de Leiria, Portugal

2024

Wood, brass, steel, bio-mineralized synthetic nacre, glass, river pebble, basalt, ochre, suevite, oak, concrete, copper, coral, silver, fossilized whale bone, titanium; 179 x 30 x 98 in.

Presented as part of Emergence: Art from Life

Michael Jones McKean’s of kin and bone and circles draws on his ongoing planetary-scale sculpture Twelve Earths, which began with Fathomers’ support in 2017.

Twelve Earths connects twelve global sites dispersed along a perfect ring encircling our planet, ranging from a 15-million-year-old impact crater to a former nuclear testing ground, a primeval forest, and an underwater mountain range. With assistance from diverse teams of scientists and other interdisciplinary collaborators, Twelve Earths reveals a complex portrait of the planet.

One site on the ring, Abrigo do Lagar Velho, is a limestone rock shelter located in the Lapedo Valley of present-day Portugal. It contains one of the most significant archeological findings of the past century: the 29,000-year-old remains of a four-year-old child that shares both Homo sapiens and Neanderthal ancestry. Known as the Lapedo Child, the skeleton forms a morphological mosaic that rewrites our understanding of the cultural and biological processes leading to the emergence of modern humankind.

Red stains on the upper and lower surfaces of the bones suggest that the body was wrapped in an ochre-painted shroud; a young rabbit, the pelvises of two red deer, a perforated-shell pendant, and a head-dress made up of four canine teeth decorate the remains. Finally, a branch of Scots pine was burned at the site before the child was laid to rest. Such ritualized burial places this ancient child within a continuum of ceremony, death, loss, grief, and mourning spanning millennia.

With Dr. Stephen Fong, a synthetic biologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, McKean coated a replica of these hybrid human-Neanderthal bones in biosynthetic nacre, or mother-of-pearl. McKean’s large-scale diorama embeds the child’s new nacre bones among an array of charged symbolic objects, in a tableau referencing birth, burial, and the interconnectedness of materials and life forms on our planet. Nacre naturally occurs in bivalves, gastropods, and cephalopods— some of the most ancient lineages of life on Earth.

Mother-of-pearl gives the child’s bones a soft glow. The rest of the four-year-old’s family has been lost to time, but their parentage has not. Placing the grave site under a protective outcropping of limestone kept the child’s body cradled safely within the earth for nearly 30 millennia: long enough for their descendants to forget what the child’s world was like entirely and then to discover it anew.

— Natasha K. Boyd