Mary Shindell usually creates big-scale artwork. Her new project is personal — and much smaller

Phoenix artist Mary Shindell usually creates artwork on a big scale. Think sprawling works of public art, intricate mosaics on a winding sidewalk, bright murals on a highway underpass.

But there’s a smaller project she’s creating just for her — one that’s much more personal.

These are layered drawings of satellite images of the places her DNA originated, and then Shindell layers the drawings with drawings of botany from those regions, often of food her ancestors farmed.

It all started when Shindell, like so many of us these days, decided to get her DNA analyzed to find out her genetic history. Before the results came in, she thought she knew a lot about where her family came from, but she soon learned she was wrong.

Full conversation

MARY SHINDELL: I was surprised to find that I had DNA from North Africa and from Western Asia. And it was kind of just a surprise to find that out. That DNA and Scandinavian DNA is my oldest on the DNA timeline. … It goes back to, like the 1600s. And then I have DNA — I have Neanderthal DNA. [LAUGHS] I don’t know if you should tell people that. A lot of it … That was fascinating. Yes. So I found out I had this sort of surprising DNA. The bulk of my DNA, my most recent DNA, is of course, Irish, English, Scottish. …

Those are the ones that I had, like, contact with. I knew the Hoyts and the Robertsons and the Halls. I knew all of those people, so that didn’t surprise me. But I started thinking about, how did this happen? How, you know, how did this African DNA end up there? And then I remember once I had said to my dad something about how I thought his grandfather was very adventuresome to homestead in Kansas. And my dad said, “I don’t think it’s adventuresome.” He said they had big families and they had to figure out a way to feed them.

And I thought that’s probably what drives pretty much everything that goes on in migration. And so I started thinking about that in terms of this earlier DNA, where I knew no one.

LAUREN GILGER: So, you’re taking these satellite images based on where you could trace your DNA, your genome.

SHINDELL: Right.

GILGER: And you’re overlaying them with botany because of this kind of farming connection.

SHINDELL: Correct.

GILGER: It looks very — it doesn’t look like a satellite image to me. Describe it for us.

SHINDELL: Well, I do a little bit of changing to the satellite imagery, and so I draw the landscape first. And then when I’m drawing the terrain of the Earth, like in North Africa, There’s a lot of desert, but there is also a lot of water and mountainous areas and things like that. So, as I’m drawing that, I’m drawing it with the idea that I am going to place botany on top of it, and I am going to let the terrain show through parts of the botany.

GILGER: Yeah, it looks overlaid.

SHINDELL: It is, yes. And so I started out by putting out the basic shape of where things go and then searching for botany that will work. For instance, in the North African drawing, the botany in there is a rose that grows in Africa — a beautiful white rose that grows in Africa — and then also some emmer, which is a form of wheat.

Another thing that drove migration back then was in Scandinavia and in England and Scotland and Ireland, there’s no sun. So, wheat is like a luxury crop. Whereas in Africa, they were able to grow it. So, they were trying, you know, they were trying to not just migrate as people, but they were trying to migrate botany so that it would grow. They would try to grow it wherever, you know, they were living, take it back with them.

The first thing that drove people to migrate in my family was the land. So, I make the land the most important thing, and so it exists underneath everything else. The botany goes on top of it. And I try to keep parts of it transparent — even parts of the landscape transparent. To me, these are sort of like. They are like landscape drawings, basically, in a different format. I just take them apart and put them back together again in different ways.

GILGER: Yeah, it’s really a beautiful product. And it seems like it’s very personal to you.

SHINDELL: It really is. And I basically will listen to books when I draw.

GILGER: What kind of books?

SHINDELL: Well, all kinds of books, but the ones that are the most probably meaningful for what I’m doing are history books.

GILGER: Related to these places.

SHINDELL: Related to these places.

GILGER: Interesting. So you’re learning about your family’s history way back when, as you’re doing these drawings about that exact movement, mobility, right? I wonder this because when you talk to people about mapping their or their DNA and finding out all of these secrets about their family history, I always wonder — it brings up this question of, like, what does it mean?

Like, does it mean anything to you that you realize, you know, that hundreds of years ago, generations and generations ago, you had people come from these other parts of the world. What have you learned about yourself in this process?

SHINDELL: Well, basically, I’ve learned that there had to be — for all of them and for us also, as descendants — there had to be a lot of resilience to travel like they did when they did. I used to think, you know, “Oh, my ancestors were early pioneers to Oklahoma and Kansas.” And I always thought that must have been really hard. That was probably really hard. And I’m not that — I’m not like that. [LAUGHS] But then COVID hit, and I started thinking, well, maybe that’s the kind of resilience that we all have in our genes, because it maybe is passed down through our ancestors to just be able to deal with that sort of thing.

But basically, I was absolutely so impressed by the fact that earlier than the 1600s, even the Scandinavian people were getting on the long boats — getting on any boat before they even had navigation — and just hugging, hugging the coastline, because they didn’t know any other way to get around. And I just couldn’t fathom having that kind of courage. It still amazes me. It really amazes me to look back on something like that and think, “Wow, my ancestors did that.”

GILGER: Does it feel empowering?

SHINDELL: It does. I mean, it makes me feel like you can’t really take all the little things in life — you can’t really take them so seriously because these people were just like, pushing to do whatever they wanted to do and just basically going over all the obstacles to get it done. … You always think, well, I got this from my mother, I got this from my father, the things that you know about.

But this is like a huge amount of data that you get from all over. So part of this drawing process that I’m doing, I take those flowers — I have the drawings scanned at very high resolution by someone who’s able to do that well. And then I take them into the computer, and I’ll cut out various parts of them, particularly the botany.

So I will have botany from North Africa, botany from Scandinavia, botany from England, Germany, Switzerland, everywhere. And what I will do is in between the drawings, as I’m mapping the progression of time, I will mix them together. So, I’ll put the African with the Scandinavian, and then carry that forward to the next in between drawing. Until at the end, I’ll have hopefully a very large grouping of botany in a large format digital print.