Parallel with the Cocoon that the student artists are making, I am filling a wall of the Gallery 370 with a pattern of red, white, gold and black hand-folded envelopes. The sequence of colors is transcribed from the human genome, substituting colors for the four nucleotides (adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) that make up all known living life. Instead of the double-helix in which these building blocks are arranged within our DNA, I am flattening them out into quilt-like panels that read from left to right. Even if we were able to cover all four walls of the gallery, we would not begin to approach the 3 billion characters that compose the entire human genome. Friends, family and students continue to help me fold the many envelopes, currently approaching 4500.
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