Mark Making

Herbert Read Gallery at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) presents Mark Making, a group exhibition exploring the creative approaches, processes and artistry behind the practices of three tattoo artists. 

Bringing together painting, photography, and a visual wall collage tracing the journey from initial sketch to finished tattoo, Mark Making invites audiences to look beyond the tattoo itself and consider the artist behind it: their gesture, decisions, processes and ways of making. 

The exhibition brings together the work of MJ Smith, Amia Town and Katya Taylor, three artists whose practices approach tattooing from distinctly different perspectives. 

For MJ Smith, an early-career tattoo artist working at Drawn & Quartered, process is central to the practice. Her contribution follows the development of a recent tattoo from its initial sketch on paper through to the finished work, making visible the stages of experimentation, refinement and translation involved in tattooing. The work offers an opportunity to consider the tattoo not simply as a finished image, but as the outcome of an evolving artistic process. 

Amia Town, tattoo artist and owner of Beloved Light, brings together her tattooing practice with an accomplished painting practice. Her paintings reveal a visual language that moves between the two forms, with each informing and enriching the other. The exhibition includes a series of paintings, many created especially for Mark Making, offering a glimpse into the wider artistic practice of an artist whose work is most often encountered on the skin. 

Alongside these practices, Katya Taylor, a photographer and recent MA graduate from UCA's Farnham campus, turns her camera towards the spaces and people that make up the tattoo community. Based near Canterbury, Taylor is creating a new series of portraits and photographs made in tattoo studios in and around the city, focusing on female-presenting and female-identifying tattoo artists. Her work brings attention to the environments, relationships and individuals behind the practice, documenting a creative community often encountered primarily through the work it produces. 

Together, the three practices ask audiences to reconsider what it means to be a tattoo artist. Within the exhibition, the word “tattoo” becomes almost silent within the title Tattoo Artist, foregrounding these practitioners as artists first and foremost, whose work may ultimately take the form of a tattoo. 

At its heart, Mark Making is an exhibition about the act of making: the mark, the gesture, the line, the body, the sketch and the decisions that connect them.

Artists bios

Amia Town 

Amia Town is a Kent-based tattoo artist specialising in illustrative designs, with a particular focus on nature and female beauty. She carries this interest into her watercolour practice, exploring the softness of nature and the feminine through contrast: predator and prey, dark and light, harsh and soft, bright and dull. For Amia, there is a natural tension between the delicate imagery of a tattoo and the harsh cut of the needle used to create it, which informs the striking visual quality of her work.

Amia has been tattooing since 2017 and opened her own studio, Beloved Light Tattoo, in 2022 as a safe space for all, particularly women. For Mark Making, she is presenting personal work that explores the ideas and imagery that inspire her professional tattoo practice.

https://www.instagram.com/amiatattoo

MJ Smith 

MJ Smith is a tattoo artist based in Canterbury, Kent, who has been tattooing for almost eight years. She primarily works with a rotary pen-style machine and is developing a practice specialising in Neo-Traditional tattooing, a style rooted in traditional tattooing but characterised by greater variation in line weight, bold outlines, vibrant saturated colour and contrasting highlights. 

Her work also draws on imagery and visual approaches associated with Art Nouveau, Japanese ukiyo-e and Art Deco. For Mark Making, MJ is exhibiting a Neo-Traditional piece that documents her process from initial design through to the finished work. The piece explores the struggles, triumphs and decisions involved in transforming a client's tattoo idea into a final design, offering an insight into the process behind the finished tattoo. 

https://www.instagram.com/mjsmith_designs

Katya Taylor 

Katya Taylor has been studying photography for 13 years and recently completed her Master's degree at UCA. Her practice uses photography as a documentary tool to deepen her understanding of the world around her. 

For Mark Making, Kat worked closely with a selection of local female tattoo artists, taking time to understand their individual workflows and the passions that inspired them to pursue tattooing as a career. Her project also considers the changing tattoo industry, particularly the role of social media in creating opportunities for emerging artists to share their individual interests and styles, while developing communities around shared passions between artists and clients. 

https://www.instagram.com/ekatchrome/