They Did Everything They Could With What They Had, 2022
Durational Performance for Camera
Stick and Poke Tattoo by Mark Mason
A series of five photographs show handwritten text in scaled shades of blood red reading ‘They Did Everything They Could With What They Had’. Moles, goose bumps and imperfections betray the ground as skin. Created through the stick and poke tattoo method - although without ink - (by tattoo artist Mark Mason) the text wound was facilitated to heal without scarring. The progression of the text colour displays the wound being gradually subsumed into the body.
In this work, the body is positioned as a vehicle for the mind to be ferried through difficult, sometimes uncomfortable states of our human experience. By enduring the pain of the tattoo and the three month process of tending and healing, my attention was constantly drawn to meditate on the text. The finite bodily healing time provided a defined period for synonymous mental processing.
The statement ‘They did everything they could with what they had’ offers both acceptance and forgiveness, but not a condoning of actions taken. This text is about the common pain of forgiveness and love. Specifically, it relates to forgiving long lasting, traumatic actions my parents made during their divorce. The wounding of skin argues for the importance of experiencing pain, its processing value and how it is the common tissue of our shared humanity. The photographs do not reveal the gender, sex or identity of the body as an intentional way to achieve a psychological attribution of the wound being imagined on the viewers skin.
Similar to the photographic approach in VALIE EXPORT’s ‘Genital Panic’ (1969), the photographs are representatives of the private action, a “distillation of the idea”. They are controlled outcomes of the action which are “not documentary proof of the performance, but are dependant on it, “their meaning inherently linked” (Widrich, Mechtild. 2011 “Location and Dislocation: The Media Performances of VALIE EXPORT” p96) to the tattoo.