A Traumatic Encounter with the Real, 2022

A permanent tattoo of a degraded children’s Superhero temporary tattoo, on the artist’s arm.

On initial viewing the tattoo appears to be that which it imitates - a temporary tattoo - and it is only on closer inspection that it is revealed to be a permanent tattoo.  This moment of realisation is a manufactured encounter with the Real (as conceptualised by Lacan and Zizek). Simultaneously, it reveals the futility of this search and the bleak possibility that beneath the Symbolic, there is no Real. 

‘…The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.’ Baudrillard

A temporary tattoo is designed to mimic an actual tattoo. Through the process of returning a temporary tattoo back to its origin, the piece proposes the possibility of a return to the Real. But it is deliberately clumsy (and knowingly doomed), akin to David Lynch’s Chicken and Fish kits. The Real, once lost, can never be restored.

This friction between the Real and the Symbolic is further exacerbated by its rendering in conceptual art, a form of art that is embedded in the Symbolic 

The artist’s motherhood is essential to her identity as an artist and becomes philosophically relevant in this piece - An adult wearing kid’s fake tattoos typically signifies that they’re a parent- in this case mother/(m)Other.