Bloodlines Project 2020–2022
‘Bloodlines: Mapping Inheritance’ a solo exhibition at The Department Store, London 2022
Bloodlines was a two-year exploration into the fragile interplay between biological inheritance and personal mythology. As an adoptee, Groom’s understanding of identity had always been shaped by absence—by partial truths, fragmented records, and inherited silences. Through drawing, painting, and printmaking, he set out to navigate this terrain, using visual language to unpick the threads of genetic legacy and the myth-making that often fills its gaps.
Scientific motifs—biochemical string diagrams, x-ray crystallography, and AI-generated protein models—became recurring symbols in the work, standing in for both the precision of biological data and the unreliability of human memory. These forms served not only as visual anchors but as metaphors for the contradictions he encountered: the empirical versus the imagined, the recorded versus the remembered.
