Part of my fascination with tattoos started in 2008 when I encountered a German artist who was tattooing pigs with images from religious art and then putting the pigs up for auction.
Why do we expect things to go as planned? Each week I start out with a work
plan: I plan the work and then
work the plan. If I can screen out
the distractions, I usually do a good job of meeting deadlines. In my life there are a wide variety of
short term and long-term deadlines.
E-mail and phone calls are definitely distractions and with
a certain project mine have definitely gotten more colorful than
previously. I have received
messages with subject headings such as: "I can feel your sizzle",
"another town to paint red" or "your king-size bed is
booked" in reference to a new assignment, I have been referred to as
"the Highway to Hell girl" and my all time favorite "blonde
bitch goddess". If this doesn't
sound like your usual fine craft goings-on you'd be right.
For several months now, I have been talking, thinking and
investigating tattooing. I am very
taken with the craft and narrative behind the contemporary practice of
tattoo. Here in Newfoundland,
tattoo has been associated with sailors, soldiers and prisoners. Where I come from in Quebec, the
association has often been with bikers.
Somehow, I never dreamed I'd be interviewing Hell's Angels in the name
of craft but there you go: never
say never.
It is clear to me that tattooing has made the transition
from being part of the fringes of society to the mainstream. A quick troll through the TV channels:
Miami Ink, Ink Masters, Tattoo Nightmares and more makes it plain. And when I heard on the Dragon's Den
that there were currently more tattoo parlors in the United States than Star
Buck's, I was convinced that tattooing had reached a new height in the
contemporary psyche. Tattoo Life has become part of my required reading.
I believe this tattoo is worn by Dolly Cool Clare in the U.K. Feltmaker Trine Schioldan sent me a whole raft of craft related tattoo images. Thanks!
The joke has become if you want to find Gloria in a crowded
place just look for the line up of men taking their clothes off. When I was at this past summer's Folk
Festival in downtown St. John's I asked lady potter Maaike Charron if I could see her
medieval-inspired tattoo. Both she
and I studied at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto at
one point. Maaike obliged me and
to my surprise it sparked a chain reaction that was instantaneous. Before I
knew it there was a line up of strangers quite literally taking off their
clothes to show me their ink. I
remember looking up from the craft tent and seeing the line up and thinking,
"I will never make it to the beer tent before closing time."
Why does someone make the commitment of using their body as
a canvas? How do they choose their
designs? How do the designs
reflect taste and society? Where
do they choose to put it? Tattoos
are both private and public and the narratives are endlessly engaging. I've talked with young men who have
brought their own drawings to ink masters and it appears that some are even
doing their own inking in a version of the Do-It-Yourself movement. I think I've stumbled into an area of
contemporary craft with huge accessibility. Think street culture or graffiti and sketching meets
embroidery. My imagination spins
with how the show might look, the combination of wall-hung images and living
models. The programming has
endless possibilities…
No comments:
Post a Comment