Artist Heather Freeman’s project “Denisovan” is coming to CPCC Pease Gallery from July 14 to September 4, with a closing reception on August 28 from 5-7 p.m.

She will show prints and text from the app she created to illustrate a fictional narrative of the Denisovan child.

About the project

Denisovan is an interactive artist’s book by Heather D. Freeman, Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  This mobile app is neither a game, nor a book, but resides somewhere between the two and is available on iPhone, iPad and Android mobile devices.

The story is a fictional imagining of a girl who died 40,000 years ago.  It was inspired by the genomic mapping of a contemporary of early humans and Neanderthal: the denisovan hominin.  Bone fragments from a single individual were found in a Siberian cave, and paleogeneticists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology mapped the genome, determining that the fragments belonged to a previously unknown hominid.

The story of human evolution is many things.  One part of this story is the nurturing of children by mothers and fathers, generation after generation.  We know that the denisovan girl had brown hair and eyes, but we can only speculate on her family structure, and how parent-child relationships may have evolved in the last 40,000 years.

Download the app for iPhone and iPad

Download the App for Android

Learn more here: http://denisovan.blogspot.com/