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Expanding our understanding of family, community and what binds us together requires us to look beyond conventional definitions and documented histories. While official records like birth certificates offer us names, dates and biological ties, they often fail to capture the emotional, cultural and chosen connections that shape our identities and our sense of belonging. In a world where families are built not only by blood but by shared experience, mutual care and collective memory, we must turn to other forms of expression to grasp the full picture. 

Visual art, through painting, sculpture, photography and other media, has long served as a powerful tool for representing and reimagining lineage and connection. These works can embody intimacy, inheritance, loss and continuity in ways that resist formal categorisation. A family portrait may reveal who is physically present, but also who is emotionally central. A sculpture might abstractly represent generations, resilience, or migration. A photograph can capture unspoken dynamics: the touch of a hand, the distance between bodies, a gesture of affection or estrangement. 

Such representations invite us to ask: What does family look like when it isn’t constrained by official records? How do artists convey relationships rooted in mentorship, solidarity, or shared struggle? What visual metaphors such as threads, branches, shadows, echoes might they use to trace the invisible ties that bind?

Art can fill in the silences left by documentation. It allows us to see what a birth certificate cannot: the emotional textures of a relationship; the complexities of chosen family; and the legacies passed through gesture, tradition, and story rather than DNA. By engaging with these visual representations, we expand our understanding of lineage not as a fixed biological chain, but as a living, evolving network of connection and meaning. 

Programme: 

10:30 - 11am: Coffee and Introduction

11am - 12:15pm: Panel 1

Chaired by Joost Joustra

  • Siobhan Jolley (Manchester) Rethinking “Holy Family” with Early Modern Magdalenes
  • Henning von Mirbach (Cambridge) "Memorializing the Mother in Landscape: Fa Ruozhen’s Rising Peaks and Pilling Cliffs."
  • Rachel Healy (Trinity College Dublin) The Cornaro Family in Renaissance Venice

12:15 - 12:30pm: Coffee break

12:30 - 1:45am: Panel 2

Chaired by Susanna Avery Quash

  • Cordula Grewe (Indiana) Picturing Belonging: Lineage, Artistic Community, and Jewish Emancipation in the Bendemann Family Portrait (1832)
  • Divya Gauri (Woxsen) (Re)thinking Family through Service: Ayahs and the Visual Culture of Care in Colonial India
  • Helen Lewandowski (Royal Collection) Domestic Documentation in the Duchess of Connaught’s Photographs

1:45 - 3:15pm: Lunch and Optional Tour

3:15 - 4:30pm: Panel 3

Chaired by Maryanne Saunders

  • Michelle Yee (Virginia) Liminal Space in Laurel Nakadate’s Strangers and Relations
  • Bill Balaskas (Kingston) Invisible Bonds: Atmospheric Rivers and Reimagining Kinship Through Water
  • Elena Zanichelli (Marburg) Family Values: On the Visual Re Articulation of a conflicting model

4:30 - 6pm: Panel 4 (with drinks reception)

Chaired by Jack Hartnell

  • Margit Thøfner (Open University) Sisters: portraying conventual families in the Netherlands and Germany
  • Daniel Monk (Birkbeck) ‘The Reading of the Will’: shifting artistic representations of the pleasures and perils of inheritance

Lunch and refreshments will be provided as well as an optional collection tour.

If you wish to attend the event either in person or online please contact [email protected] with your name, affiliation, dietary and access requirements.

This event is generously supported by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.