About

I make work in the space between survival and disappearance. Flesh Archive begins with a question that the Picts have been asking for over a thousand years without answer: what does a culture leave behind when the materials of its memory are more durable than the people who made them?

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The Pictish peoples of early medieval Scotland are known to us almost entirely through stone-carved symbols whose meaning remains unresolved, fixed in a material that has outlasted every context that might explain them. The stones endure. Everything else is inference. Flesh Archive takes this asymmetry as its starting point, and inverts it deliberately.

Process and material

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The work begins in the studio with the cultivation of bioplastic skin sheets: membranes grown slowly from organic matter, handled with the same attentiveness given to living tissue. These are not supports or substrates. They are the work itself, perishable, translucent, weighted with the particular fragility of things that know they will not last.

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Onto these surfaces, Pictish symbols are tattooed by hand. The process is unhurried. Each mark is made through the same sustained bodily attention that has defined tattooing as a practice across cultures and millennia, a tradition of marking that predates writing, predates monuments, predates the categories we use to separate art from ritual from record. The needle meets the membrane with the understanding that this encounter is temporary. The skin will degrade. The marks will be lost.

This is not incidental to the work. It is the work's central argument.

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Where the Pictish symbols we inherit are fixed, monumental, and stripped of the bodies that first carried them, Flesh Archive insists on return, returning the marks to something skin-like, something mortal, something that participates in time rather than standing outside it. The cultivated membrane does not preserve. It accompanies. It ages alongside the marks it holds and eventually releases them.

In doing so, the work asks whether the archive is ever the object, or whether it has always been the act. The Picts who carved their symbols into stone were not making permanence their aim — they were making meaning in their present, for their purposes, in a world that has since completely changed around those stones. What I am making is also meaning in a present. That it will not survive intact is not failure. It is the condition.

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I am a maker who works slowly, by hand, with organic matter that does not cooperate with efficiency. That is not a limitation I am working around. It is the position from which all of this work proceeds.