Eve's Umbilicus encaustic, charcoal, sanguine, and antique silk quilt square (made by someone in my family) on cradled birch panel Heredity, blood, and battle are the things I've been dealing with and thinking about, both in my family's interior world as well as the world at large. The branches are vein-like because trees do resemble the veinous system, and this past year has been a nightmarish fight with viens for my family. Angioma/cavernous hemangioma, a hereditarty condition in their case, has been discovered in five of my close family members, resulting in a whole host of symptoms. I wanted to express the idea of time, space, and individual lives existing in a branching shape. Everything into one, everyone from one. Mathematics, fractals especially, seem to me to be the basic footprint of God, woven through existance down to the finest particles. P.D. Ouspensky wondered if we are each like a slice on a branch of the same great tree- seemingly disconnected from one another and from time, as the tree is seen from above- a group of individual circles- but in actuality we are completely connected. If you think about it, we have been physically connected to our ancestors in an unbroken line since the beginning of our human existance: womb to cord to belly button to womb over and over. I chose the likeness of Bernini's David as an Earth for the tree, a God for the creation, partly because he's not passive- he's fighting against the unseen Goliath as we all are.