Illma Gore, 22, a Brisbane and Gold Coast street artist and clothing designer living in Los Angeles, is offering a unique place for others to inscribe their tattoos: her own body.
Gore is the daughter of a multi-millionaire Australian land developer who lost his fortune. She grew up on the Gold Coast but was homeless as a teenager after her parents died.
Gore told KTLA Los Angeles, said, “The first lesson I learned when I was three years old was not to draw on walls, and now I do it for a living.” Pointing to the back of her neck, she said of her offer, “From back up to here, and around, except I want chin up under here and everywhere. Everywhere that doesn’t have a tattoo.|
Gore’s Kickstarter site offers her body for $10 for one or two words tattooed on her body. She wrote on the site, “Help me cover my body in tattoos before I’m sick and old and knitting mittens for lobsters.”
Her explanation reads:
I want to be a singular tattoo for my latest art exhibition, and I want it to be your names. This is going to be an art exhibition in LA featuring my body and your names. I think the tattoo on my forehead says it best ‘Life is art’. There is something absurd & beautiful about having an accumulation of absolute strangers names draped over my pale goth skin, even if half of them are ‘Penis Butt’. Why? you might ask, simply because I can, I know what I’m about son, and I am my own ultimate canvas. Like my art exhibitions and murals this is a social and artistic experiment! Each persons name to me represents YOU the main protagonist in your own story. I will be covered in a hundred tiny stories.
Gore hopes to raise $6,000 from her project. She wrote, “I chose 6K because talking to the shop I go to regularly, we estimate about 60 hours of work, plus gallery exhibition costs, As soon as this campaign is over we will begin! I’m going to force my friend to edit and film a bad ass vid for youtube from start to finish! Including a photo-shoot of the before and afters that will be presented in the form of an exhibition.”
Gore told KTLA, “I’ve never had so many people worried about my career before in my life, but my friends are all like, do it, you’re going to do it anyway … It’s very odd. It will annoy people, or make them very happy or make them smile, either way. That’s what art’s supposed to do.”