“Whenever you’re in a new class at school and you have to say your name and tell everyone something interesting about yourself. I always said I was a twin, that’s what was interesting about me”
The Moonface & The Spidermonkey
My brother and I shared a womb for nine months then shared a room for the next sixteen years. We both look the same, he’s taller, but I’m seven minutes older. We grew up in the same place, surrounded by the same people, had similar interests and the same upbringing. For the first eighteen years of our lives we were almost identical (but we’re not). Now we’re at a point of divergence he lives in London and I live in Cardiff, we have different friends and live in different environments surrounded by completely different influences. I never really miss him and whenever we see each other, nothing’s changed, but as we get older will we change? Will I miss him? Then when we see each other will it be obvious that somethings different, that we’re no longer alike.
This project is a complex photographic study that investigates myself and my twin brother using numerous scientific methods in order to explore and understand what it means to be a twin, in relation to your own individuality and existence, allowing me to also enquire into what it is that overtime forms the self. By looking through the scientific archive, we can trace the insatiable human desire to understanding the foundations of life and consciousness, from early phrenology and Nazi experimentation to the human genome project and animal cloning. Parallel to this we can trace the long process that has scientifically objectified twins and recruited them as evidence and material, imagining and treating them as tools in order to animate these new theories of life, development, and disease. Thus, allowing researchers to continue their pursuit to gaining an understanding of what it is that acts as the foundations of each of us and what ultimately makes us individuals.
