Contemporary Artist
Jai Gilchrist
Art Practice
My practice explores identity, transformation and the relationships between the body, the individual and society. I work as a tattooist, painter and conceptual artist, with each part of my practice informing and enriching the others.
My tattoo practice is a collaborative and performative process. For me, the interaction and conversation between artist and client — between myself and the person I am collaborating with — is as important as the finished image itself. The making of the tattoo becomes part of the work, and the tattoo then continues as part of the wearer’s evolving personal narrative, carried and changed by the body over time.
Extending from this, my conceptual and painting practice looks at constructed identity, transformation, authorship and the ways artists and individuals are represented and understood. Projects including C.R.A.A.P., Form and Flow – Body as Story, and the developing HomeGround project explore where identity becomes performed, mediated, recorded and transformed.
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What We Carry
HomeGround, Western Plains Cultural Centre, 2027 — in development
What We Carry explores tattooing as a process of identity, transformation and exchange. The project brings together painting, tattooing and installation, looking at what happens between artist and sitter during the transformative act of tattooing and at the traces that remain afterwards.
At the centre of the work are six large-scale painted portraits of people I have tattooed. Each portrait develops from the relationship and conversations formed through working together, rather than simply documenting the finished tattoo. Alongside the paintings, reliquary-like objects preserve physical traces and personal objects connected to each sitter and the tattooing process.
The finished installation will bring these elements together around a tattoo station, placing the ritual of tattooing — the exchange, the body and the process of making — at the centre of the work.
Form and Flow - Body as Story
Vellum Tattoo Studio, 2019-2023
Form and Flow – Body as Story brings together eight large-scale tattoo works developed collaboratively with the people who wear them. Each began with conversations about personal history, experience and identity, which I then interpreted through drawing and tattooing into a narrative designed specifically for that person and their body.
Influenced in part by Arabic and Chinese illustration, the work uses the movement and shape of the body as part of the storytelling. Rather than treating skin simply as a surface, the tattoos are designed to unfold as the wearer moves, exploring tattooing as a living and evolving form of narrative and identity.
Form and Flow - Body as Story.
Curbar Ridge Association of Artists and Painters (C.R.A.A.P.)
2011-2017
C.R.A.A.P. was created to explore the relationship between artistic identity, authorship and the way an artist’s work is represented and understood through the lens of their perceived identity. The project began with my own experiments with identity while studying Fine Art and developed into a fictitious collective of artists supposedly living and working around Curbar in the Peak District.
Over a six year period I created seven distinct artists, each with their own history, artistic practice, physical artworks, websites and social-media presence. The collective moved beyond the digital world into real exhibitions, where actors appeared as the artists themselves, allowing the fiction to exist alongside — and occasionally unnoticed within — the established art world.