Derma 2mm

I am a queer performance artist and self taught tattooist practicing in Naarm, so-called “Melbourne”. Primarily, my work operates with the belief that tattooing is a transgressive and transformative experience with the subversive power to turn suffering and subjection into pleasure and excess.

While the body becomes subject to social classification, I uses body modification through performance as a means of deconstructing and re-inscribing identity. Since, acting on the body allows for self-fashioning and self-narration in ways that oppose biological or sociological essentialism.

Moreso, the permanency of the customized body facilitates personal agency and control, offering contingency in a world where nothing is assured and everything is in flux. By asserting control over our own body and our aesthetic intimacy, tattooing becomes an act of resistance and survival. Considering new challenges to connectivity and intimacy as well as restrictions on and anxieties around touch in the face of a global pandemic, this new work considers tattooing as a means of touch and radical self-soothing. Offering up my body to you- the viewer, I intend to carve space for grief, loss, healing as well as redemption and strength in vulnerability.

Working through live performance combined with digital projections, live streams and multiple screens, the work further considers digital architecture as a space for connectivity and intimacy.

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and practice. The Woiwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nations and pay respects to elders past and present.