My name is Felicity Boardman. I'm a professor at Warwick Medical School. I DNA is a concept that's emerged out of my research. The Imagining Futures Research project. So my research really set out to explore the views of people living with relatively common genetic conditions in the UK. So that project really was exploring their views towards genetic medicine. Their ideas about their own health. The value that they assigned their own lives and how they see that value as being perceived by other people as well. So the research really brought out this idea that these people feel that their condition isn't something that the public are aware of at all and and they really wanted more people to understand what it was like to live with a condition like theirs. And so bringing the findings of the research to the public became really, really important, given those types of findings and I DNA is the translation of some of those ideas that came out of the research into an artistic installation that can be viewed by the public and can reach audiences that I would never be able to reach to reach on my own as an academic. [singing] "we all struggle.." So when visitors. first  arrive at Idna, they are first of all going to see an airport style scanner and they'll see signs pointing them into the installation. When they enter in through the scanner, they are next going to see this amazing sculpture, the denaturing Helix, which really dominates the space. It's a 3 meter high sculpture and it's coming apart, covered in bags. They will also see two monitors in the space and on the monitors they will see various portraits, filmed portraits of faces, very diverse faces, and they will also see the words that are being spoken and sung into the space, and they'll also see some facts about genetics. So I think art is a really important vehicle. It's a visceral sensory experience. It draws people in in a way that an academic paper doesn't. It really was important for me to be able to get the stories to the general public, and I think through art we can really get at the, I suppose the human side of the stories that came out through the research. By actually using things like song by using voices by having the kind of the visuals as well, people can have a physical experience that connects them to the live realities of people living with genetic conditions. So working with an organization like Stamp, an artistic organization, was really a new experience for me. I hadn't worked in that way before and it really required me to think in different ways about my research findings, to think about how they might be viewed by people other than academics, which is what I'm sort of trained to think about. And it was really interesting for me, because stamp approached the project in a completely different way than I would have done personally. They came up with ideas that I wouldn't have thought of myself, and some of them took me by surprise in many ways as well. So the singing for example, was something that I never would have envisaged for projects like I DNA and having the research data sung was really an interesting concept, and at first I wasn't sure if it was going to work. I wasn't sure whether or not having the research data presented in that way would get the messages I wanted to across, and I think it's been a really fantastic experience to see how people have responded to the singing in the installation and how it's got, it's communicated something other than the words, it's communicated some of the emotion as well. It's brought the words on the page to life and communicated them in a really interesting way, [singing] "I would like to have a job...". Ultimately, hearing it from a human voice is really important because it's about getting at the stories and hearing a person saying it to you rather than reading it on a page really brings.. ..it really animates the stories. So I think we decided early on that we wanted to go with the iconic image of the double Helix, which really represents genetics for so many people. We wanted people to immediately know when they're going into the installation that genetics is at the heart of this installation. But what we decided was to have the Helix denaturing it's coming apart and I really like this because I really like the idea that we are moving away from the biology of the genetics. We're thinking about its social side as well. It's cultural meaning. It's coming apart. It's not quite holding together and it's this opening up of genetics to all the voices and the stories that are within it. We also wanted to include bags in the installation and we wanted those bags to really represent both the nucleotides, so they represent the four colors that traditionally represent the nucleotides on the DNA. But we also wanted to have the bags symbolic of the kind of genetic baggage that we all carry, not only thinking about it from a baggage POV, and that's something we all carry around with us. We all have a genetic legacy, but also thinking about it from the point of view. That journey is also a theme of this installation and this idea that you know our genetic baggage contains everything we need for this journey, that is life. So we're really excited to be at Leamington Spa Art Gallery Museum and part of the a picture of health and gallery. And it's really great that I DNA can be part of an art gallery 'cause we have mostly been to science orientated locations so far. So we're really excited about being somewhere where it can be part of an exhibition. That's focusing on contemporary interpretations of medicine, health and the body, and it means that we can think and draw out the. I suppose the artistic side of idna and focus on that when it's in this kind of context of an art gallery. [singing] "But would I change her" so I DNA really resonates with audiences because it's about human stories. You go in, you see human faces. You hear people talking about their lives and although their lives might be different to yours in that they are affected by a genetic condition that perhaps you're unfamiliar with, you recognize the human elements you recognize to degree yourself in those stories as well, and I think that's really what people take away from it. The similarities as well as the differences with the people stories that they're hearing, and it's encouraging people to think about genetics in an entirely different way.