︎
gift giving
art is the ultimate form of gift giving. it is a gift you receive immediately upon perception or interaction; even if one only sees it once they permanently own the gift of having seen it.
gift-giving is an ongoing series about limitations.
- moral (not wanting to be a burden to those around me) (not being a sell-out to a capitalist system)
- financial (what can i afford to make)
- scale (i am living largely without a permanent home, studio or workshop)
i am making small drawings, paintings, collages in an attempt to keep a studio practice going without feeling like i have any real means of doing so.
i am collecting sentimental objects, often random things that i find or that were otherwise clearly once valuable to people who have outgrown them or passed away.
i am trying to be practical in making a living off of art, but often finding that practicality at odds with the joy of being a young artist surrounded by other young artists
if i could never charge anyone for my work, i would. everything i make would be a public work, free to my loved ones and strangers equally. this is how all art ought to be.
how does one price art reasonably when i know that others budgets are as tight or even tighter than my own?) (mates rates ?) (friend & family discount…?)
is me giving my art to you even a gift, or are physical gifts burdens to carry around forever, that one feels to guilty to get rid of even if they don’t even care that much about the object itself, but they do care about the person who gave it to them?
these limitations, at least partially (and some would argue fully) are not real, or at the very least self-imposed. If I was more enterprising, i could probably source a studio and workshops. if i was smarter with my spending i could allocate more to materials and less to my own personal spending. and so on and so forth.
but i believe these confinements to be true in at least how i want to live my live, and how i want art-making to fit into it. and so they create an interesting question of what i can achieve with the parameters i have set for myself.
these parameters basically being:
- the work is intellectually-fulling for myself, but accessible for those i present the work to (either as audience or gift-receiver).
- the work is affordable to people who are living off of minimum wage jobs
- the work is offered as a gift to either a; myself (thematically), b; a loved one (literally), c; the community i am living in (a public work/event), d; it is made from an actual gift I received.
art is the ultimate form of gift giving. it is a gift you receive immediately upon perception or interaction; even if one only sees it once they permanently own the gift of having seen it.
tattooing has become a fascination, or rather obsession, of mine since i began to consider what it means to own something wholly. what is a tattoo? it can hardly be called an object, since it is not separate from ones self, and sections of skin cannot be itemized as if they are not all connected in one piece. skin is a complete object without the tattoo. it constantly generates and decays in a perpetual loop for the length of ones lifespan. to mark that skin either with a sign of identity, a decoration, or a commemoration of an event is to then live with that sign forever, watch it age and see how it’s aging emblazons time. as gift giving is meaningful because objects serve our memory in keeping up with the vastness of our lives, tattooing is a personal demarkation of life stages and the accumulation of tattoos allows one to create a visual journal of the myriad personas one lives during their lifespan. i have been grateful that almost all of my tattoos come from friends. i will always think of them, and the life i lived when i knew them, when i look at my skin. when i die, my tattoos die with me. when i draw, i create an object which has a life outside of me. that drawing has potential to live for thousands of years beyond me. but tattooing is the opposite. it is solely mine, a gift from the artist to me. however, as no piece of art is solely anyones, it is also a gift from myself to the world around me as they look upon my skin. here is where gift giving is controversial, as not everyone is always welcoming of every gift they are given. and if art is a gift that an artist gives the audience by allowing them to be their witness, then a tattoo is a gift from both the artist and the tattooed person.
in this way, the tattooed person lives the double life of curator and walking gallery (and often artist as well, as in tattoos done on ones self).
