Intersections: Practice-Based Researcher Showcase

The ‘Maternal Series’ is a triptych of photo-emulsion screenprints created as part of a practice-based PhD exploring contemporary tattooing and its relationship to wellbeing, commemoration, and identity.

Each print was developed in response to the visual and narrative data gathered from three participants whose tattoos related to diverse experiences of motherhood and maternal identity. Through a creative practice-as-research approach, the series seeks to encapsulate and communicate the visual, emotional, and embodied meaning of these tattoos, while inviting discussion around their collective significance within contemporary culture.

Each print comprises multiple layered elements, including illustrative tattoo imagery, gestural mark-making, and fragments of textual narrative. This layering of visual and textual forms generates depth and complexity, whilst the scale of each print echoes a sense of their value and significance.

The tattoo imagery occupies the foreground in stark contrast to the underlying painterly and gestural layers, which act as expressive reflections of the original image.

Colour functions intuitively throughout the series to reflect an intangible emotional context: ‘Blue’ reflects loss and longing, ‘Pink’ speaks to intimacy and affection, whilst ‘Yellow’ suggests hope, renewal, and transformation. Textual narratives are partially obscured within this composition, becoming visible only through closer viewing and physical movement around the work. This process of physical navigation parallels the ways tattoos are often perceived within society: initially understood at surface level, yet capable of revealing deeper personal and cultural significance through active and sustained engagement.

As individual pieces, each print communicates the unique lived experience and maternal theme embodied behind the visual image of a tattoo, yet collectively, the series offers an opportunity to reflect on tattoos as cultural artefacts which embody memory, preserve stories, and archive the shared complexities of the human experience across time.