By Laura Robertson, October 2025
I recently read about how a grandmother’s cells can protect her granddaughter in the womb. ‘Microchimeric’ cells somehow, astonishingly, are passed down and stick around in the daughter’s womb to manipulate her immune system, creating conditions that favour a foetus that carries her maternal genetic material.
I have a rudimentary knowledge of biology, and DNA is a remote idea, more associated to me with TV forensics, or cloning, fictional and glamourous. I can't say that I've ever thought of a female line as being held in the flesh; in the atomic, infinitesimal of things, and what that allows in terms of the bigger picture. This chance reading admitted some buried thoughts on maternal lineage, female relationships, and inheritance. My mum, Moira, and the fractious memories she has of her mum, Peggy; the sisters and aunties, our loud visits to their houses where everyone would talk over each other; the Celtic red hair, handed down to Moira but not to me; a strength of will, of opinion, a forcefulness, which I also share, as do all the women in my family, in that Irish Catholic Matriarchy; a link to each other in personality but also in the actual material of our bodies.
Does it mean I carry Peggy with me – a woman I never knew – not just in spirit or stories, but in genetic matter? And her mother, and her grandmother, ad infinitum? Is that ‘chimeric’ mythical monster – of disparate body parts – now evidenced in the microscopic makeup of my flesh and bones? What does that mean in a cultural sense, exactly, beyond the scientific? How much of ‘me’ is owed to ‘her’?
One of the first things I knew about the artist Marie Jones was her relationship with her grandmother, Margaret Robinson. It was almost intimidating to hear how they collaborated together frequently on the production of Jones’ artwork – large-scale tapestries, projection design and interactive installations which require many hands and technical expertise – and how Grandma Robinson had long been a reliable and encouraging force. I met Robinson at the unveiling of ‘Waves (Grandma’s House)’, a full-scale knitted replica of the detached house she still occupies, installed on the stage of Parr Hall Theatre. Seeing a life-size house as soft sculpture, illuminated with stage lights, is an experience that challenges our sentiment and attachment to ‘home’, and fittingly coincided with Jones’ group exhibition ‘Any, Body, Home’ at the nearby Warrington Museum.
Providing childcare and then later production support to her granddaughter, Robinson's contribution to Jones’ practice is even more significant when recognising the challenges facing working-class artists, and how profoundly difficult it is to maintain a large-scale practice as working mother (beset by gender disparity, decreasing opportunities, expensive studio rates, low income, and juggling multiple ‘money’ jobs). For many years, Robinson had provided a space (physical, emotional) in order for creativity to incubate and, further, to flourish.
The exhibition, ‘Any, Body, Home’, which Jones has curated, is rich in concept. I've previously been a resident writer at Flat Time House, John Latham’s home and art studio in Peckham, London, that he had officially re-classified as a body, or ‘living sculpture’ – the kitchen became the ‘heart’, or ‘internal organs’, the front room gallery the ‘mind’, and a giant book sculpture penetrating the front of the house became ‘the face’. In becoming temporary guests, my fellow residents and I experienced the house as a fulcrum, or centre point, for other meanings, of wild thinking, response, provision, and eventually, a kind of unstable sanctuary.
In this sense, too, Grandma’s House can be framed: somewhere Jones always returns to and associates with particular needs; forever present, forever cultivating. Robinson is, of course, Muse: a key figure informing and contributing to the source material for Marie’s works, and part of an ancient lineage of goddesses who preside over the arts. I was moved to read their 20-year correspondence of care, posted between Marie’s home in Anglesey, North Wales, and Margaret’s in Warrington, North-West England, now displayed in a glass vitrine for ‘Any, Body, Home’. Entitled ‘LXX’, the handwritten letters are set in chronological order within a large hardback book gifted to Margaret on her 70th birthday.
Two other artworks come to mind. ‘Monument Valley (Grand Scale)’, a self-portrait photograph made on a US road trip in 1994 by the British artist Tracey Emin, as she reads her own book propped up on her knees, entitled ‘Exploration of the Soul’, and sits in her Grandmother’s chair, which travelled with Emin cross-country. The chair became an artwork in its own right: as the tour commenced, the artist covered it in embroidered and appliquéd quotes from her Grandmother, including, “It’s not what you inherit. It’s what you do with your inheritance.” In this one image, a connection is established between the maternal force, and the artist’s present success in publishing and travel. It is imbued with layers of hereditary confidence. In Annie Pootoogook’s colour-pencil drawing, ‘My Grandmother Pitseolak Drawing’ (2001–2), the Canadian Inuk artist depicts her artist-Grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona sat up in bed, with papers and pens, creating a landscape image of the view from her bedroom window. Her walking stick lies on the floor alongside medication, and a calendar and wall clock both mark the passage of time. Viewed amongst Pootoogook’s other drawings of real and observed life in all its mundanity and turbulence – eating seal at home with relatives, watching TV, sleeping in a summer camp tent, and then, the shock of violence, in the depiction of a man abusing his partner with a weapon. Grandmother Pitseolak’s time drawing in bed becomes a life raft, a crucial and peaceful moment in uncertainty that speaks to an artistic lineage.
Jones' work, too, acknowledges the maternal, chimeric inheritance. It was Robinson who taught Jones how to knit, and provided the yarn and needles. Understood as an ode to the home she spent so much time drawing, painting and knitting in as a child, ‘Waves (Grandma’s House)’ also refers to goodbyes, to the enthusiastic and prolonged waving of the Grandmother as the Granddaughter drives away. This 25-foot, 3D woollen house is open for visitors to enter, and in walking through the rooms, we are better able to examine the surface texture of neon green and white stitches rippling across supple walls. Jones has long used punchcard knitting machines to this effect. In Borges Glitch (2014), she converted her late husband John Young’s musical compositions on the Yamaha Tenori-on from LED lights into a 7x7m hanging of cashmilon 4ply acrylic neon orange dots, with the messy, leftover threads exposed at the back. Here, every part of the house has been touched by other people. The process included photographing the house’s internal and external walls, then formatting these images into pixelated grids, or panels, from which a plan for individual knitted rows (thousands) could be shared out and managed. 113 people learned how to machine knit over 3 weekends of workshops in Warrington; recreating, or replicating, all the familiar domestic items – kitchen cupboards, sofas, a bathroom sink, the trellis framing the front door – from Grandma Robinson’s home.
Latin origins of the word replica are rooted in copy or repetition. Combining re (‘back, again’) and plicare (‘to fold’), to replicate suggests the folding back of, or going back on, time; a duplication of something that already exists, that lives in the past, or is remembered. Grandma’s House, then, becomes a portal for repeat visits, returns and recollection, but also in reliving the past, reliving the meanings and feelings Robinson's home gifts to her granddaughter.
The exhibition also features ‘Memorise Mesmerise (Aunty Jean’s Jumpers)’, Jones’ wall display of 64 original jumpers by Jean McGlynn, Margaret Robinson’s twin sister. Handknitting every day, each finished jumper is usually stored away in a cupboard as she starts the next one. Brought out into the open, en masse, the individual pieces lose their function as clothing, and become one entity: a coarse, uneven tapestry that charts decades of underappreciated or unseen creative work. This routine is echoed in Jean and Margaret’s relationship: two elderly women who lives hundreds of miles apart, who call each other for two hours every Sunday without fail.
Consider the divine old women of Gaelic folklore, particularly thinking of Cailleach, an ancient elder and protector, arriving from Europe with stones in her apron to create the isles; Grandmother of healing waters and provider of snow for winter; who holds standing stones for pregnant mothers to give birth under. These sacred women appear in every culture. It is interesting to me that the maternal force viewed at the macroscopic level (carrying responsibility for the emotional and practical needs of society and the environment) and at the microscopic (carried in the cells) both feed into a mythology of matriarchy, and the weight still carried on those shoulders. It is women who have historically provided the conditions for us to grow – and to grow up.
Jones’ work continues to analyse this expanded idea of inheritance in the most surprising ways, whether it is in creating badges for girl guides in which to contemplate their life goals and wellbeing, or in interviewing other female artists about access and inclusion, or in honouring her relatives, as she has done so markedly at this stage in her art practice.
Hesman Saey, T. (2015) ‘Cells from grandma help keep fetus safe’, Science News, 23 July. Available at: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cells-grandma-help-keep-fetus-safe (Accessed: 1 October 2025).
Romer, Christy, ArtsProfessional, 2019. Only a third of artists’ income comes from their art, research finds. [online] ArtsProfessional. Available at: https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/only-third-artists-income-comes-their-art-research-finds [Accessed 1 October 2025].
Blackie, S. (n.d.) Greening the Hag. Available at: https://sharonblackie.substack.com/p/greening-the-hag (Accessed: 1 October 2025).