Blood Memory
What I like about art fairs when they are good, is how they can act as an incubator for myriad new encounters with artists and galleries never before glimpsed. I had this experience on several occasions that day, and seeing Nicole Wilson’s work at Photofairs with Praise Shadows Gallery from Brookline, Massachusetts left a lasting impression.
The work on view was called ÖTZI, and it comprised a series of 15 framed photographs upon chest high metal shelves, each showing an unremarkable area of the artist’s own body upon which were displayed little red marks that resembled runes. These marks were documented and replicated from oldest mummified human body still in existence, only just discovered in 1991 on the border between Italy and Australia, at a great altitude. This mummy was ÖTZI, and he was a Copper Age man, dating from 3300 BCE. The marks that inspired Wilson were the earliest recorded practice of Tattooing. They were made using human blood, which was repeatedly applied over the same spots until the pigment base of the blood itself left permanent marks.
Because the original mummy hailed from a historical period sufficiently distant from our own, the marks found upon him will forever remain a mystery. Wilson made a connection between modes of self-expression and its basis in origins of social identity. This body of work is therefore elevated from its status as documentation, and becomes a symbolic act important for its role as creating a shared memory over time.
Wilson’s project began in 2012, and the version we are seeing today was its second iteration, completed in 2016, after further analysis of the corpse revealed numerous other ritual scars that added to the visual vocabulary available to her. The photographs I saw were in fact a process showing the marks as they fade over time, when the blood applied to the skin recedes back into the body. It’s ironic that this is the case, but it shows early man attempting to carve out meaning in a world in which so much is yet mysterious, and in which the forces of nature will have their way.
It’s one thing for a person today to dress up in the clothing of an ancient person, to hawk their mannerisms, and to re-imagine the very text of their lives. But to share their skin is an act of daring. I’ll be thinking on this work of art for some time to come.