Northern Art Carbooty 2018 - First In The Fight!

This Bank Holiday weekend saw Northern Art Carbooty taking place on a very wet and soggy Sunday at Sadler's Yard and PLANT NOMA in Manchester. Yet, despite the weather we had a great turn out of people coming down to enjoy the live art, stalls, workshops and artisan food. 

I was there with The Tattooed Lady, tattoo dispenser machine, to distribute my Manchester Suffragette temporary tattoos as part of a new commission to celebrate the centenary of women gaining the vote in the UK (as a side note: I've had several men over the course of this project who felt the need to point out it wasn't just women but working class men gaining the vote too, and, yes, I know, that was great in its own right! But for women this was a MASSIVE landmark that gave [some] females the right to vote for the FIRST TIME EVER! I really don't understand why this achievement should be somehow 'put in it's place').

Dressed as a Manchester Suffragette, I manned the machine and helped apply the tattoos to people attending the event. I met loads of interesting characters from Manchester and beyond, some who knew about Manchester's involvement in the Suffrage movement and some who had no idea. I met two ladies from Switzerland who told me the centenary for them wont be until 2071! The whole day made me feel really proud to be a Mancunian and champion what the original Suffragettes stood for. They truly were 'first in the fight' and thanks to their effort and sacrifices Manchester played a key role in women's history and helped to change the world. It was amazing to see so many people show their support by wearing a tattoo!

(These guys from America were some of the first to receive tattoos and loved them!)

There was a great atmosphere throughout the day and I was joined by some of Manchester's best creatives. Taking a stroll around the venue on my break I met some faces I'd not seen for years! It was good to catch up and also see some of the gorgeous unique wares made by local artists

 Manchester illustrator Stan Chow and his iconic women prints

Eva Elliot of Margo Ceramics and her delicate jewellery 

Also I want to mention the brilliant art of Cammy Smithwick, who I forgot to take a photo of, but whose work I have loved for a while now. It was fab to see some of her handmade trinkets that make me think of booty from a wacky Victorian explorers backpack: unique, exotic and full of stories waiting to be imagined.

Fellow commissioned artist Nicola Smith performed her piece 'Monument' as an ode to modern women and the lack of statuary honouring women from history around the UK. This piece was performed/danced against a range of different songs about female empowerment, funny and on the nose, it really left an impression.

You can see more images and see if you were one of the people wearing a tattoo on my Tattooed Lady Facebook page HERE and also more about the day on Carbooty's photos HERE. A big thank you to Liz and Charlie for organising the entire event and asking me to be part of it and special thanks to Samira who volunteered her time to help me apply tattoos.
 

Northern Art Carbooty is coming! Get your Suffragette Tattoos!

Not long now until Northern Art Carbooty comes to Manchester! I'll be there with The Tattooed Lady and a specially commissioned work to celebrate 100 years since women got the vote in the UK. I've been preparing my outfit for the day as I'll be appearing as a Manchester Suffragette to help rally YOU folk join in for the cause and get your very own temporary tattoo.

I have to say I'm really pleased with how these beauties turned out (see my last post to find out how I designed these tattoos). I wore mine for three days before if showed any hint of budging. Come along and enjoy a day of art events, stalls, food, workshops and more! Hope to see you there!

Northern Art Carbooty 2018 - The Tattooed Lady Returns!

The Tattooed Lady is an end of the pier 1900's style temporary tattoo dispenser I created three years ago for the launch exhibition at HOME in Manchester. She is an interactive art work with flashing bulbs and a friendly 'ding!' that offers audiences the chance to take a piece of art home with them, either as a keepsake for posterity or as some temporary 'ink' to wear proudly on their skin.

I am now bringing The Tattooed Lady to the Northern Art Carbooty next month for a new commissioned piece. August 26th will see me and the Lady at Saddlers Yard and PLANT NOMA in Manchester:

'The event is an extravaganza of art, craft, live performance, workshop activity, food and music. Northern Art Carbooty works with artists and designers to encourage new artistic collaborations with the communities located around the event'

For this new work I am concentrating on 100 years since women got the right to vote in the UK and I have been designing a special tattoo to celebrate not only this landmark event but also Manchester's crucial role as the place where women's suffrage was born! I love my city not least because it has a rich history of being bloody minded and bolshy but it has led many a revolution influencing social and political change.

I began by looking at famous Manchester figures such as Emmeline Pankhurst, Annie Kenney and Hannah Mitchell, all fantastic people in their own right. However I found the photos of little known Manchester suffragettes marching and being arrested really moving and inspiring. They brought home the fact that these women risked so much not just for themselves but for the sake of every woman since.

For that reason, rather than concentrating on one person I decided to design a Mancunian 'everywoman'. My suffragette was very inspired by these two photos; the first being two local women wearing news sheets as aprons...

Mabel Capper (left), who by 1913 had been to prison four times in the cause of obtaining the vote for women, and Patricia Woodlock (right) advertising a meeting to be held in Heaton Park, Manchester, Lancashire, 19th July 1908

...and this fantastic Manchester banner once lost in time but now proudly on display at the People's History Museum in Manchester. I think the words on this banner are so powerful and say so much about the city and it's people,

For the tattoo design I wanted to incorporate mills and factories in the image not only to emphasise Manchester's connection to Suffrage but also the fact that many women who became involved in the Manchester movement came from a working class background. With the city booming in the 1900's thanks to the cotton industry, factory work was a mainstay for many of it's growing population.

This was my first design and I looked to Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman for the stance. I always thought Lynda looked strong and assertive when she stood like this with her hands on hips. (Interestingly, Wonder Woman's origins come from a Suffrage background as the creator was a firm supporter of women's Suffrage and his mistress's aunt was Margaret Sanger, an advocate for birth control and a women's rights activist). 

The tattoos are to be just 2" x 2" to fit The Tattooed Lady and I decided once shrinking this design down that it was packing too much into such a small space. Plus I wanted to push the Manchester connection even more within the image so it would be more obvious. I tried playing about with scale and placement but I still thought the whole thing wasn't immediate or 'tattooey' enough (I do like the original image though so I may use it for something else in the future).

In the end I decided to focus mainly on the suffragette's head and shoulders and create a tighter pulled in design. I added a banner for the words 'First in the Fight' and also the Manchester Bee which reflects the city's history and continuing unity in the face of adversity.

The suffragette stands in front of the chimneys (a bit phallic I realised, but they do reflect the male dominance of the era) wearing her hat with its green white and purple ribbon symbolising the movement; purple for loyalty and dignity, white for purity, and green for hope. The white roses stand for the white that suffragettes wore on their protests and also more recently recalls the white roses worn by celebrities on the red carpet to support the #timesup and #metoo movements.

I felt that this image worked better overall and will have more impact when applied to the skin. With the design now sent off for printing I'm looking forward to getting the finished temporary tattoos in my hands and trying them out! You can get your own at Northern Art Carbooty on 26th August! You'll find me there with The Tattooed Lady appearing as a Manchester suffragette myself! More on that to follow, stay tuned!...

Film of The Tattooed Lady

On Friday the talented film maker Hilary Easter Jones came to HOME to film The Tattooed Lady and over the weekend she has created this fantastic short film. I love the way it captures the piece's playful yet melancholy feel. As the film says the exhibition closes next weekend so you have one week left to visit the Lady and get a tattoo while they last!

Tattoo transfers: The Tattooed Lady

Remember those bubblegum sweets you used get as a child, the ones that had the cheap tattoo transfers in the wrapper?

I loved those. The tattoos were always rubbish, fuzzy undefined things but so exciting to wear! They are what partly inspired me to create my own tattoo transfers for The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, an exhibition exploring heartbreak and the dark side of the funfair: 

Dodgy tattooists and partners names impulsively etched into the skin. These were the ideas flitting across my mind as I thought about work for the show, and they seemed to sum up the exhibition's two themes perfectly.

Tattoos are physical scars. Love can leave emotional scars. Sometimes these two things meet and become permanently tangled together.

I collected true stories of love tattoo regret to create new designs for my temporary tattoos. Here are the stories told verbatim and how I translated them into new art works:

The Dead Squid

It's not the first thing you think of when you mention a loved one, but this anonymous story shared through my website was not only funny but ripe with inspiration! It helped me create an image of hopeless finality

'The One that I thought was The One but was not The One and I took a trip to Scarborough. Upon arrival, we immediately decided to get matching tattoos of a > shape on our hands from a dodgy seaside inker. When you put them together it made a ><, which was cute until we realised it made our fingers look like the tentacles of a dead squid. Our relationship is as dead as said squid, and now everyone thinks I've got some weird heart etched on me. Annoyingly, the ex's < is super crisp and nicely done. Always do your research kids... '

The challenge for me here was creating an aesthetically pleasing dead squid, something droopy, slimy and met with an untimely end. There was a lot of tentacle placement, drawing, tracing and re-drawing until I got the look I was going for. I feel quite sorry for this wilted chap.

 

The beaten up fairy

A simple tale that puts images into your head, I decided to show an unusual version of this common motif,

'I started getting tats at the very young age of 16. Stupid. I regret all of them and am in the process of getting them removed. My first was done by my boyfriend of the time. I got a fairy on my lower stomach. Pregnancy, weight gain, and gravity have beaten her up pretty bad over the years. She lasted much longer than the relationship' 

 

The Indian Ink

How many people can relate to this thoughtless teenage act? And how many of them did it for this reason? I wanted to create something that would show the crudeness of the tattoo and the permanence.

 

'Everyone was doing it; crosses, skulls, initials, the whole school was getting it done. It was my mate’s big sister who I had a bit of thing for who said she’d do it for me. Everybody was inking everybody in the mid 80’s. We used to use Indian Ink and a large sewing needle. We’d thread the needle and wrap the cotton around it so it acted as a reservoir for the ink when you pushed it into the skin.

I basically let her do it because she had boobs'

 

The swallow

Probably the saddest tattoo tale I collected, this story was shared anonymously online and I can't help feeling for the young girl who so desperately wanted to please and prove herself to her already tattooed boyfriend. The lewd remarks she now gets because of these tattoos only makes the story more distressing and begs the question; why do people feel the need to pass comment about other people's tattoos, especially to tattooed females?

'I have two American Classic style swallows on my shoulders that I got as soon as I was legally allowed. At the time I went with an ex boyfriend, who was covered in tattoos, and was too nervous to explain the positioning wasn't quite where I wanted them. This was five years ago, and now due to shoddy needle work and my nervousness the lines have spread, leaving them looking sloppy, and because of their positioning they are quite hard to cover. I've since had two more tattoos, and feel these ones were a massive mistake. Similarly I get a lot of "have you got swallows cus you swallow" when I'm out, this makes me feel very uncomfortable'

 

You can bag yourself one of these miniature artworks from The Tattooed Lady vending machine at HOME until 26th July! Join the fun and enjoy the thrill of a tattoo with a story but none of the lasting repercussions!

 

The Verb

Last week I took a trip to Salford to be a guest on BBC Radio 3's cabaret of the word The Verb. It was a great show featuring an interesting mix of people including; young adults author Liz Kessler, feminist campaigner Cristina Criado Perz, poet Christopher Reid and academic of tattoo history Dr Matt Lodder,  

Arriving at the studio I was immediately welcomed by the friendly team who work on the show and the enthusiastic presenter Ian McMillan who encouraged us all to eat apples to help with the vocal chords before recording!

What followed was a laid back and utterly fascinating two hours of chat covering feminist graffiti, the study of eating chocolate, teenage LGBT fiction and tattoo stories, in which I talked about my latest work The Tattooed Lady.

It was great to meet everyone and especially interesting to talk to Matt, who himself is a living canvas of colourful tattoos and has lots of knowlegde upon the subject.

Although first aired on July 26th, you can LISTEN AGAIN on iPlayer until the end on July

Painting The Tattooed Lady

The Tattooed Lady has landed! Friday night saw the launch of HOME's opening exhibition The Heart Is Decietful Above All Things where my art work got her first airing. I am very pleased to say she is a big hit and throughout the night people were getting covered in my tattoo transfers depicting tales of love and regret! To see more photos from the private view and maybe spot yourself sporting a tattoo visit this project's facebook page.

I had wanted to keep most of the details about how The Tattooed Lady would look under wraps until the show, so now that she is up and running I thought I'd share with you the painting process of the tattooed lady herself who appears on the machine.

From the start I knew I wanted her to have a 1920/30's look, not quite flapper girl but moving away from the belle epoque. I trawled through my books about vintage Hollywood and fashion and also began to search the internet to find the right face. The face was very important because as this entire project was inspired by tales of love and regret I wanted the lady to have a hint of melancholy.

I very nearly settled on an image of Gloria Swanson looking dashing in a gypsy headscarf but then I stumbled across a tiny black and white image of a beautiful unknown vintage lady with just the right look in terms of period but also with the most lovely pensive expression that held a hidden story of its own.

So began the design for the painted panel: I kept the lady's shoulders and neck bare in order to show off the tattoos she would be covered in and then built up an art deco style pattern around her that would allow me to comfortably fit in the text I wanted: LOVE, REGRET and BECOME A LIVING WORK OF ART. This last phrase was inspired by the posters I'd seen advertising real tattood ladies who were marketed as living exhibitions, a curious idea to our modern minds but one I really enjoy!

 

Once I was happy with the design I began to paint and here's how that process went:

I painted this image directly onto a wooden panel and found that the wood acted very differently to the canvas I am used to. It tended to suck up the paint (even after several layers of primer) which made blending more time consuming. However once I'd layerd up enough paint it began to react much better and take the colours and consistency.

I chose tattoos that would look both simple and striking and fit the shapes of the lady's shoulders, neck and chest

All inked up!

Here is the lady sitting where she was intended in the machine. You can go an visit her and bag yourself a tattoo transfer to boot between now and 26th July at HOME!