VERY
VISUAL Richardson—with her weapon of choice—tackles the
self portrait.
Makes Her Mark
Kelley Richardson throws judgment to the wind and gets behind the lens
to launch ‘The Santa Cruz Tattoo Project’
by Christa Martin
Kelley Richardson is one of those “cool” moms. Just a little
more than six feet tall, she towers over most women. She has a back
full of tattoos, and a penchant for gothic art. No surprise—all
the kids love her. And in a way, maybe she can relate to them. Richardson
learned long ago that clichés like “it’s not what
matters on the outside, but on the inside” actually have merit.
“I don’t know anything about you by looking at you,” she says. “I don’t care if you’re in a black Mercedes and you’re wearing a big ring, or you’re homeless and your teeth are falling out. … That whole idea of being judged and people assessing other people by what they appear like on the outside … it prevails in our culture, that whole judgment issue.”
And in an effort to shatter some of those judgments, especially about tattooed people, Richardson has embarked on publishing a photography book called “The Santa Cruz Tattoo Project.” The nearly completed book, which she has been working on for the last year, takes a photographic glance inside Santa Cruz’s world of ink, and the people who both color bodies and cover bodies with tattoos.
As Richardson puts the final touches on her book to send out to publishers, she has two upcoming art shows, which will feature the work from her impending book. The first is an exhibit at the UC Santa Cruz Women’s Center, Cardiff House, from Feb. 20 to March 3, where she’ll be talking about her photography project and showing two short DVD’s of this work. And from Feb. 14-March 14 the photos from this project will be part of a group show in San Francisco at the Instituto Italiano di Cultura. In addition, keeping her busy is an art show featuring her mixed media work and paintings during the month of February at the Hide Gallery in downtown Santa Cruz.
Like any mother, Richardson has a full, lively and colorful life. She’s mom to three children, ages 16, 12 and 10. Besides raising her children, Richardson, a recent graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute, keeps busy with her book project, photography work, painting and other artwork. And she’s an art teacher at Orchard School in Aptos.
But at the forefront of her life right now is the “Santa Cruz Tattoo Project” which has thrust her into practically every tattoo parlor in Santa Cruz, where she’s caught the nitty gritty of the business on celluloid. She’s also invited what seems like every tattooed person in town to her studio to take their pictures. Each photo, some of them nudes or semi-nudes, allows us to see the softer side of a group of people that are sometimes thought of as “hard.”
The book idea began as a senior college project when Richardson was studying art at the San Francisco Art Institute. It soon morphed into much more than class work when she realized its enormousness. She began soliciting for tattooed people to come to her studio and be photographed. To date, three years into the project, she has now photographed and interviewed hundreds of Santa Cruzans, and she has compiled writings from them about what their tattoos mean and why they choose to get them. These are people with an itty-bitty tattoo, to those whose entire bodies are covered, and of course, those who fall in between. “It’s not about your tattoo, it’s about you,” she tells her subjects. Perhaps one of the most unusual tattoos she encountered in photographing and interviewing Santa Cruzans was that of a man whose brother killed himself. The brother left two suicide notes—one for his girlfriend and one for his 3-year-old daughter. The man that Richardson met had the two notes tattooed on his forearms. But the photo she captured wasn’t just of his arms—it was of him.
“I have almost no pictures of tattoos; my book is about the people, not about the tattoos themselves,” she says.
So what’s the secret? Why do people like the man whose brother committed suicide get tattoos? Why does the schoolteacher get a tattoo, or really, why does anyone?
“Most people, when you say, ‘why did you get tattooed,’ they’ll say, ‘because I want to remember my mom [or something like that],’” Richardson says. “That’s a different answer than, ‘why do you want to put ink in your skin to remember your mom? Why do you actually want to do that to your body? There’s a huge disparity between the understandings of those two things, and most of the people I talk to, I never get to that answer. [But] it’s not because people don’t know.”
So what about Richardson, our photographer and investigator? “There’s a couple of things going on for me,” she says. “No. 1, the artistic endeavor. I think tattooing is an awesome art form. No. 2, I feel like the way our bodies are, we only have so much impact. But by tattooing myself I can exercise control over me. … I get to have a say on my body and what I want on it, and choose my art and talk about who I am on the inside, on the outside of my body. So for me, that’s what the whole core of this thing comes down to: Tattoos are a physical manifestation of your psychic self. They’re taking what’s in your head and heart and putting them on the outside of your body for other people to see.” And Richardson is taking tattoos from the outside of bodies to gallery walls and book pages.
To learn more about Kelley Richardson or the “Santa Cruz Tattoo Project,” call 818-3080 or visit www.strange-angel.com. Upcoming shows include The Hide Gallery during the month of February, at 131 Front St., Santa Cruz, with a reception from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. on Feb. 3, and a slide presentation from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 23 at the UCSC Women’s Center, 1156 High Street, 459-2072. She will also have a show from Feb. 14 to March 14 at the Instituto Italiano di Cultura, 425 Washington St., Suite 200, San Francisco.