British Tattoo Art Revealed
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Essex
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 25
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- National Maritime Museum Falmouth and touring nationally
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- March
- Year of first exhibition
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Based on ten years of research, this exhibition deployed 400+ drawings, photographs, objects, interviews, and ephemera to fundamentally rewrite histories of tattooing in Britain. During its four-year tour, the exhibition was held across eight venues, each requiring installation planning, site-specific research and new curatorial interventions. Most displayed items were unearthed in private collections, which meant that identification, authentication, contextualisation and negotiation of loans proved far more difficult than conventional institutional research. Additionally, because collectors are often suspicious of museums, building and maintaining the relationships necessary to secure their objects was often a delicate, complex and time-consuming process.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This portfolio contains a full representation of the output, and links to multimedia content. It also contains contextual information which highlights the research dimensions of the work.
The research spans object discovery and analysis, curatorial innovation, and critical reflection on the limits of conventional institutional collecting and display practices. The history of British tattooing has never before been academically studied through the material culture of the practice.
Based on over a decade of extensive primary source research across the globe, this exhibition presents over 400 objects from public and newly-uncovered private collections, including works on paper, machines, tools, and ephemera; newly commissioned artworks; oral history interviews; and recreated dioramas of historic tattoo studios.
Chronological text panels interrogate popular and scholarly misconceptions and use research and archival images to underpin and frame the object stories. The exhibition leads the visitor through an unbroken chain of four centuries of tattooing, and repeated didactic motifs explicitly use objects and text to respond to established and longstanding debates in the interdisciplinary historiography of the practice. Prior scholarship had asserted that tattooing in Britain was marginal, sporadic, and imported from elsewhere. This exhibition demonstrates that each of those assumptions is incorrect. Curatorially, the exhibition innovates methods to bring the living art-form of tattooing into a museum space and to preserve it for future generations. Such methods include the presentation of historic pre-served human skin; the representation of tattooing on commissioned sculptural bodies; the 3D-printed replication of early modern tattoo stamps, and the interactive collection and display of local tattoo stories. The exhibition is critically reflective, insofar as it concludes with a meditation on the limits of conventional institutional collecting practices in this country and beyond, and it is polyvocal, with didactic contributions from academics, artists, and artefact collectors, as well as members of the public.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -