The artist, who is 33, remembers learning about Ötzi as a young child, shortly after his discovery, and questioning her teachers’ assertions that the Iceman was her ancestor. He wasn’t prepared for death in any way.” “He’s a mummy, but not in the same way as Egyptian mummies. “I like to say he was preserved due to cataclysmic circumstances-a perfect storm of him dying as a storm came through, covering him in snow and ice that perfectly preserved his body,” Wilson told Artnet News. (He’s now housed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy.) He had died circa 3230 BC-likely murdered-but his body was remarkably intact, the oldest naturally occurring mummy ever found in Europe. It’s my job to live with them as they fade and carry out this project.When is a tattoo parlor the perfect venue for a contemporary art show? When the art on view is Nicole Wilson’s nearly decade-long project “ Ötzi,” in which she recreated each of 61 tattoos found on the over 5,000-year-old Ice Age mummy of the same name on her own body, using her own blood in lieu of ink-and documented the healing process, photographing as the marks slowly faded away.Īrchaeologists discovered Ötzi the Iceman in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps on the Italian-Austrian border. I have other tattoos on my body that are my tattoos and yes, I know Ötzi’s marks are now on my body and they’re mine, but they’re also art at the same time. She’ll carry the marks with her as they grow lighter each day, as her body recognizes each tattoo as its own and absorbs it, as historical artifact becomes one with her body and they become just as much a part of her as they were of Ötzi.She says, “I’m purely, in a weird way, a piece of paper or something like that, that’s moving them through the world. She has taken these tattoos that belonged to him and made them her own, stating that she views them as art above all else. “I feel like by mimicking the marks on his body, by taking his marks and marking myself with his marks, I am identifying with an early ancestor.” The transference made by the marks from his body to hers not only forges a connection between the two but also reinstates Wilson’s personal connection to the marks.
“Because there’s an actual physical thing to point to,” she says. Wilson feels connected to Ötzi through their tattoos. The marks lasted about two years.Īt this moment Ötzi and Wilson’s tattoos were the oldest and newest on Earth.
The result was a series of dark pink scars (post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation) the color of the heme was visible underneath the skin as the body slowly broke down its pigment.
She called a friend with a tattoo machine and put the then-found 59 tattoos onto her body. Through research, she found that blood contains a pigment called heme and, theoretically, the body reabsorbs its own blood. She wanted to create a “cyclical process where I was marking myself with his images but through something that was mine and only mine and inherently mine, and then something that would become part of me and I would sort of swallow his marks.” So she tattooed the images onto herself using something produced by her body: her own blood. There was something deeply feminist and very empowering about doing this.” But she knew that simply tattooing them would be too easy, too direct a translation. I became obsessed with the idea of taking Ötzi’s marks and making them mine. “My artwork at large is interested in challenging structures of power, especially male-centered and patriarchal. “Ötzi is an archeological figure, but he also can be translated into an archetypical male figure,” Wilson says. Wilson, drawn to these marks found on the representative of early man, decided to recreate Ötzi’s marks on her own body.