On SKIN: Shelley Jackson’s Ineradicable Stain
JA
April 13
Somewhere out there to date, there are around 510 people with the words of Shelley Jackson’s short story tattooed onto their skins. If Jackson gets around 1500 more, she’ll effectively have ‘published’ her fiction as no one else has done before – on the very bodies of her readers.
The SKIN project began around 2003. Jackson put the call out on her website for volunteers to get a single word, nothing more, tattooed anywhere they chose. The only rules are that participants cannot pick which word they get assigned and that words naming specific body parts must not be inked on the body part named (you couldn’t for example simply have ‘hand’ tattooed onto your hand).
SKIN volunteers stretch all around the world – Thailand, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Brazil and even Iceland. A google maps feature on Jackson’s website shows several here in Melbourne: ‘disappointments’ in Murrumbeena, ‘love’ in North Melbourne and ‘remember’ in North Carlton. New South Wales has ‘they’ in Rose Bay and ‘after’ in Fairfield, and there’s also ‘Each’ near Darwin and ‘with’ around Perth. Jackson sees her participants not as people or carriers of text but as ‘words’. This might seem a little strange and dissociative at first, but as this old profile in the New York Times pointed out, it is something to imagine ‘[a] sentence getting together for dinner’ or ‘[a] paragraph having a party’.
All tattoos are done in black ink in a classic book font. If you’re interested in joining other ‘words’ out there, visit Jackson’s site here.
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Comments
13 Apr 10 at 9:47
I like the idea of a word party! Story aside, I think it's like people joining clubs (e.g. music sharing groups) in online chat rooms and then meeting in person - their interest binds them. But the story is the most interesting part!
Imagining academic theses on this...
...13 Apr 10 at 10:26
That is so damn fascinating! This writer’s “words” have legs to travel and promote her tale all over the globe. Love it!
...13 Apr 10 at 20:45
This is a lovely coincidence: I mentioned this project in a talk in Mackay to a room of book artists just two days ago...
...14 Apr 10 at 9:37
We are all individuals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqq3e03EBQ
...12 Jul 10 at 2:09
it would be great except Shelley has left her words hanging, most of us have never recieved our full story, even 7 years later she still hasn’t assigned all the words. many of us have covered them up, because being part of a living book was cool…being part of a procrastinator’s half finished mishmash is not
...