Current WIP - Flesh Archive: Recovering Pictish Identity Through Cultivated Skin and Ritual Marking

Flesh Archive is a (soon to be) new body of fine art work centred entirely on process and making, bringing together the cultivation of biological material and the practice of tattooing to investigate the visual culture of the Pictish peoples, one of Scotland's most enigmatic and least represented ancient civilisations.
The work begins in the studio with the growing of bioplastic skin sheets, membranes cultivated from organic matter that replicate the weight, translucency and fragility of human skin. This material is not a support or a substrate in any conventional sense. It is itself the work, grown slowly, handled carefully and fundamentally perishable. Onto these surfaces Pictish symbols are tattooed by hand, each mark made through the same unhurried, bodily process that defines the tattooing tradition. The meeting of these two making practices, one drawn from biomaterial craft and one from ancient ritual, is where the work finds its meaning.
Where Pictish marks have survived only in stone, fixed and monumental, Flesh Archive insists on impermanence. The cultivated skin will degrade. The marks will be lost. This is not incidental to the work but central to it, asking what it means to make something that cannot last, and whether the act of making is itself the archive.