Let’s SEA Your Tatts: Marking our connection to the sea. In Conversation with Laura Hopes
Let’s SEA Your Tatts: Marking our connection to the sea
Krakens, Anchors, Mermaids. Through curiosity, family, or even fear, many popular tattoos show our connection to the sea. Community Reporter, Jessica Warby, talks to Laura Hopes about Let’s SEA Your Tatts, the upcoming exhibition in collaboration with LOW PROFILE’s Hannah Rose and Rachel Dobbs.
“The exhibition is a kind of reflection of what's been a six-month process of people sharing their marine and nautical-themed tattoos with us, people from Plymouth or people with a connection to Plymouth.” This exhibition takes the form of three ‘film-poems,’ a temporary tattoo parlour with six designs from thirteen Plymouth-based artists, and images of the nearly 300 individual tattoos that were submitted to the exhibition.
Sean Walker
The ‘film-poems’ arose from the stories behind the tattoos. “They're so amazingly personal, and I think that's the thing we hadn't quite reckoned on.” Laura continues to explain the “privileged position as an artist.” “People are sometimes amazingly emotionally open with you. I think particularly with this project, you'd be standing in the middle of Union Street wearing our ‘show us your tatts’ t-shirts and someone would come over and start rolling up their sleeve and within the first 30 seconds you could be talking about a really kind of intense story of grief.”
Alongside LOW PROFILE and Still Moving (Laura Hopes is one of the collective’s members), they’ve invited individual artists and collectives to design nautical-themed temporary tattoos. The artists include Ashanti Hare, Beth Emily Richards, Rhys Coren, Stephen Smith & William Luz, Thaïs Lenkiewicz, and WABKIN (Frances Daykin and Huhtamaki Wab). “It's been really nice for us, through working with the other groups or individuals who've designed the tattoos to extend the commission out to include other artists because Plymouth is a city full of artists making art”
Mary Loveday
Laura met Hannah and Rachel through various Plymouth-based art events over the years, in addition to their respective studios at KARST. Laura recalls discussing temporary tattoos as an art form with Hannah from a previous project that hadn’t gone through. “When we saw the callout from Plymouth Culture and Plymouth Sound National Marine Park, we were thinking about Plymouth as a city with a history of tattooing that we hadn't really thought about before. It seemed like a really nice way to get this idea moving.” They were also all interested in socially engaged art practices “whereby you are collaborating with communities or you're working through participation, and we thought this would be a really nice visual census of people's connection to the sea.”
Upon further inquiring into why they wanted to look into the nautical tattoos of Plymouth, Laura points out how they connect to the “amazing and problematic history of arrivals and departures and people leaving and arriving in the city.” “This history of wearable art form, often brought back from French Polynesia or Journeys across the Pacific or from Japan. This kind of artform then entered into western consciousness through these naval travels.” She also mentions Doc Price, the renowned 92-year-old tattooist on Union Street who is thought to be the world’s oldest active tattooist, along with the other “many amazing tattoo studios in the city”
I asked Laura about the project’s connection to the marine park. She proceeded to explain that “the science of Plymouth Sound National Marine Park is quite hard for people to grasp, and I guess what we are really trying to do, in this project, is get to people to recognise that they already have this real emotional connection to the sea…It certainly seems that there's this real urge to mark your connection to the sea through tattooing.”
What can we expect from the exhibition? “I think you should get quite a good snapshot of Plymouth as a place. It feels like a friendly, accessible, fun project where people have been really open and shared their experiences and their tattoos, and for me, that sums up Plymouth as a place to live and work as well.”
Let’s SEA Your Tatts is one of a series of artist commissions presented as part of Sea for Yourself, a four-year cultural programme exploring Plymouth’s relationship with the sea through contemporary art, community participation and creative technology. Led by Plymouth Culture in partnership with Plymouth Sound National Marine Park, the programme invites artists to work with local communities to uncover personal stories, hidden histories and emotional connections to Plymouth Sound. By focusing on lived experience, in this case the deeply personal stories behind nautical tattoos, the project reflects Sea for Yourself’s wider ambition: to help people see the sea not just as landscape or science, but as something woven into identity, memory and belonging.
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Let’s Sea Your Tatts is part of Sea for Yourself, a programme led by Plymouth Culture in partnership with Plymouth Sound National Marine Park and Plymouth City Council. The programme development and delivery is supported by The Box, Real Ideas, Arts University Plymouth, University of Plymouth and Theatre Royal Plymouth. Sea for Yourself is funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England Place Partnership Fund.
