Looking at the term Identity, from a psychological mindset, everyone has a set of distinct qualities or traits that are unique to themselves. How someone chooses to express or perceive them, is different for everyone. Making every single person in the world, unique to every person they will ever meet. The term ‘Identity’ is most used to describe personal identity, or the distinctive qualities or traits that make an individual unique.

 

To me, Identity is something that develops along with a person’s age and experience, identity is something that is learnt over time, and is constantly developing from birth to death. It is constructed of everything in life, personal traits, social roles, and internal emotions.

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Artists who create work with no solid meaning, allow the viewer to construct their own meaning and identity into the works. Something created from joy or happiness can be seen as solemn and underwhelming to the viewer, it is created from perception of the viewer. 

One artist who I have personally met, and resonate with in my own feelings, is Laurence Thomas, or more commonly known online and in the tattoo industry as ‘Loz Thomas’. Loz is a tattoo artist who has broken free from the constraints that have been in tattooing for decades now. In both traditional art and tattooing, he shows a very abstract style to his art, often favouring blind contour drawing and creating masses of work while some or all his senses have been stripped from him, ultimately removing his identity from his art.

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Late July 2022, Loz expressed his wishes online to try something that looked as though it had never been done before. He was reaching out to people willing to hand over their trust, and allow Loz to tattoo blind on them, removing social and physical pressures from his craft, and allowing him to create something purely from intuition and feeling. From first glance, this appears as though he would have stripped his identity from his art, but he has also managed to create pieces of art that are nothing but his internal identity and process. 

Being one of the few people to go and speak to him about this, I got to experience his working process and how Loz, used this technique to express himself freely while tattooing, and we spoke about how gratifying it was to see so many people willing to put curtains over what was considered standard and let Loz’ identity and personality take over into an unknown creation, that would be on their body permanently.

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Speaking to Laurence in person, he had an overwhelming amount of passion and identity flowing from this project. Creating a safe surrounding and headspace for himself, with unconventional sensory stimulations, it allowed him to transfer his higher mind into a real, permanent piece of work. Saying himself, “I think that when we bypass the mind, we’re able to become channels for something higher to work through us and, for me, blind drawing has been the most effective technique to get to this state” 

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Overall, after visiting Loz, and having the opportunity to see him work in person, I have experienced the expression of Identity in a unique way, seeing how someone with a different workplace to myself accesses their higher mind and successfully uses their identity and comfort to create detailed and unique art, with no boundaries. I interpret Loz’ methods to strip his social identity from his artwork, and instead create something that is full of his psychological and emotional identity.