Ink & Skin & Bone
The text of women’s traditional tattoo practice in California has been utilized as a social and political status signifier and an expression of relationships to land and community from time immemorial. The creation of Ink and Skin and Bone seeks to reclaim visual representations, and serves to connect to past, present, and future Indigenous visual sovereignty efforts to create our own narrative. The content and thematic resonance of the work brings attention to how this suppressed practice is breathing life again as we dismantle heteronormative and pan-Indian expectations of the Indigenous appearance. The intent is to recreate the common visual narrative presented about who we were and who we will be, and what we look like as Indigenous peoples, (re)writing from the perspective of the Indigenous experience.