Is tattooing the new graffiti? A woman has won a coveted City of Melbourne arts grant to document and present an epic tattoo on her back as art.
Performance artist and cancer survivor Sandra Minchin-Delohery is having 17th-century Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem’s still life painting Vase of Flowers inked on her body.
The $7000 grant will go towards videoing the process for a DVD and website, printing a book and holding unveilings, and an artist talk with Dr Gemma Angel, an international expert on tattoos on preserved human skin.
Minchin-Delohery has called the project Art Lives Longer Than Life, Ars Longa Vita Brevis.
When living in Ireland three years ago, her father died of prostate cancer. After her own cancer treatment left her unable to have children, she wanted to explore what we leave behind after death.
Visiting the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, she spied de Heem’s “stunningly beautiful” oil painting.
To her, the cut flowers symbolised the transient nature of beauty and life, and the painting proved how artists’ works live on after their deaths.
She feels her project will bring futher life to de Heem’s painting by “reappropriating” it for the newly popular medium of tattoing and the technology of multimedia.
Minchin-Delohery, who is about to start a PhD, is interested in tattoos’ modern role in empowering people and helping them deal with grief, for example covering breast cancer scars or as memorials to loved ones.
She will explore the notion of tattoos as high art, and would like to see tattoos hung in the Louvre, either through skin displayed after death, through 3D medical printing, or creating new skin from a sample and tattooing that.
When the tattooist in Galway was about one-third of the way through her piece – 40 hours of sessions, up to five hours at a time – Minchin-Delohery’s husband, Thomas Delohery, an artist and teacher, was offered a job in Melbourne and the couple emigrated 18 months ago.
She recently chose a Melbourne tattooist, who she declines to name, to resume the piece from scratch, which she expects to be finished by mid 2015.
But as the artistic director of what goes on her back, and of the DVD and the unveiling events, Minchin-Delohery considers herself the artist and the tattooist the “technician”.
“I want this to be a high art piece, that is the aim of this. I would hope to do one of the unveilings here in Melbourne but it will also be done in London and also Dublin. I was hoping to do it in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.”
The City of Melbourne’s 2015 annual arts grants, announced on Monday, comprise $765,000 given to 58 artists across film, music, visual art, theatre, dance and multimedia.
