Geraldine Ondrizek

The exhibition Becoming You, You A Journey From A Single Cell あなたになるまで   ひとつの細胞からの物語  is an art–science collaboration that visualizes human development from a single cell to birth through twelve paintings mounted on Japanese scrolls. It is an excerpt from the companion book Becoming You: A Journey from a Single Cell. The work is accompanied by a video of the book read aloud by the author, Dr. Shizuko Takahashi. The scroll format of each painting evokes the sense of a tale unfolding, while the book is intended to foster genetic literacy and self-esteem by celebrating the beauty and commonality of the genes we share. Grounded in embryology yet shaped by narrative pacing, the project translates stages usually confined to microscopes and clinical diagrams into images that can be read slowly, like a story. Viewers move through fertilization, early cell divisions, and implantation, encountering both the precision of biological change and the fragility of its contingencies.

Geraldine Ondrizek’s paintings on habotai silk using dye and water colors, illuminate Dr. Shizuko Takahashi texts. Dr. Shizuko Takahashi created the central image using Japanese shibori (stitched resist dye). This series of paintings brings together materials and visual languages that rarely meet. Fine linework reminiscent of scientific illustration sits alongside textile patterning and flowing forms that echo DNA, membranes, and cellular migration. Layering, staining, and translucency suggest the way bodies are built—by repetition, differentiation, and loss—while generous negative space creates an ethical pause, resisting spectacle and refusing to treat reproduction as a purely technical achievement. The tone is deliberately tender rather than triumphant, inviting attention without prescribing a single moral conclusion.

Installed as a continuous journey, Becoming You asks what changes when we meet our beginnings as visible, continuous, and shared. By making early life legible without collapsing it into propaganda, sentimentality, or policy slogan, the work opens space for wonder and for difficult conversation about kinship, bodily vulnerability, and the ethical stakes of reproductive and genomic technologies. At its core is a sustained inquiry into personhood: where a life starts, how it becomes recognizable, and what we owe to that becoming.

Works In The Exhibition

Wall scrolls

• Meeting 2025 - 58”L x 12 ¾W"
• A World In A Grain of Sand 2025   58”L x 12 ¾W"
• The Intricate You 2025    58”L x 12 ¾W"
• One Cell 2025    58”L x 12 ¾W"
• Passing Down 2025   58”L x 12 ¾W"

Works in Case

• Migration 2025   46”L X 10”W
• Cleaving 2025   48”L x 5 1/2”W
• Growing  2025   35“L x8”W
• Differentiation 2025   58”L x 12"W
• Attachment 2025   58”L x 12"W
• Library of Information 2025  38”L x 8”W
• Building Blocks 2025  28”L x 6”W

Biographies

Dr Shizuko Takahashi MD, PhD, is a fertility physician-researcher, certified clinical geneticist, bioethicist, and children's book author-illustrator. She writes between clinic hours and bedtime stories. Her books bring genetics into everyday life and ask, gently, what fairness and peace require. They invite children and parents to see a connected world — and to consider what kindness, in a genetic age, actually demands.

Her three children are third-generation atomic-bomb survivors, a family history that keeps peace at the center of her work. In 2023, Japan's Cabinet Office recognized her outreach with the Women Challenge Award (Special Award for International Achievement, G7 Utsunomiya). She is the author and co-creator of Becoming You with artist Geraldine Ondrizek (Fusosha, 2025). Her first book, The World Caught a Cold (Nicomo, 2020), has been translated into more than 15 languages, and Tokyo Broadcasting System produced a national read-along. She also co-produced a 2021 sex-education book with Sanrio and UNFPA.

She earned a BA in Molecular Biology and Studio Art from Reed College in 1997 — where her art advisor was Geraldine Ondrizek — an MD from Tokai University in 2002, and a PhD in biomedical ethics from the University of Tokyo in 2010 on how Japanese patients decide the fate of frozen embryos. She is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore; with Professor Julian Savulescu and team, she works on reproductive ethics and AI in fertility care, and more broadly she studies how genetic information shapes — and sometimes misshapes — the most intimate decisions people make.

Jess Joner has worked as the studio assistant to Geraldine Ondrizek since 2024. Jess’s social art practice, integrates ceramics, painting, textiles, and photography to facilitate, enhance, and cultivate communal gatherings. Her multidisciplinary art seeks to cultivate genuine connections, spark meaningful conversations, and cultivate a sense of belonging in a world often characterized by disconnect. Through radically ordinary hospitality, she arranges the gathering of people with an intent to recover the unhurried simplicity of human connection through the ordinary act of commensality. Jessica Joner resides in the Pacific Northwest and earned her MFA in Visual  studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

About Personal Structures

Personal Structures is the biennial contemporary art exhibition organized and hosted by the European Cultural Centre Italy in Venice. The 8th edition will run from 9 May until 22 November 2026 in parallel with La Biennale. In a society marked by fractures, displacement, and accelerated transformation, Personal Structures – Confluences emerges as a space for encounter. It is a place where artistic practices, cultures, and disciplines intersect, contaminate one another, and generate new possibilities for coexistence. In the group show, visual artists, photographers, sculptors, performers, universities, and artist collectives, both established and emerging, bring a multitude of perspectives to the historical venues of Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, and Marinaressa Gardens.

About The European Cultural Centre

The European Cultural Centre (ECC) is a non-profit association headquartered in the Netherlands, dedicated to fostering cultural and intellectual exchange through exhibitions, cultural projects, publications, video series, and educational programmes worldwide. It collaborates with associations and partners worldwide, including educational, cultural, and governmental institutions, as well as NGOs, museums, foundations, and various private initiatives.

Sponsors

Thanks to our sponsors for the exhibition at the ECC:

The National University of Singapore Center for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, The Wellcome Trust of London, University of Oxford, Oxford Population Health ETHOX, The Ford Family Foundation, Reed College