You wouldn’t know it to look at a fully clothed Geoff Ostling – a retired 65 year old history teacher from Sydney – that he was tattooed. No, correction, that he was heavily tattooed. But he is, and it’s this body of work which is the focus of the documentary Skin which airs on the ABC on April 14.
Ostling’s tattoos cover at least 90% of his body. ‘It’s easier to say the areas that are not covered,’ he recently told OUTinPerth. ‘I don’t have any tattoos on my toes, or on the soles of my feet. The arms from the elbows down are not yet completed. They’re outlined. We’ve done a lot of work on them but they are not yet complete. I don’t have any work on my hands or my fingers and I don’t have any tattoos on my head, neck, scalp, face or chin. They may happen one of these days but they haven’t happened yet.’
Ostling’s obsession started almost 20 years ago when he met one Mervin Chapman, who had an incredible bodysuit made up of iconography from Greek Mythology. Like Ostling today, Chapman’s tattoo could not be seen under normal work attire. It impressed Ostling so much that he began his own bodysuit in Brisbane in 1988 with a small little pink triangle under his left nipple. He returned a year later and had big festoon of Australian native plants put around it.
It was approximately five years later that Ostling met eX de Medici, an artist known for her for her amazingly detailed paintings which often sell for around $120 000. Ostling knew from the moment they met that there was something special about this woman. What ensued – and is still happening – has been a 15 year relationship. And now, as the documentary shows, their relationship is all set to hopefully carry out long after Ostling dies.
‘When Mervin died I really felt sad that I didn’t get the opportunity of photographing his body at the time of his death,’ Ostling explained. ‘When he was buried I felt really sad that that fabulous tattoo, which was done by a whole heap of famous overseas people too, just went into the ground and died. And so I talked to eX about this and she said ‘yes Geoff but that’s the way it is when you put your flowers in the vase – they look fabulous and then they die’.
‘Out of our ongoing collaboration came an invitation to attend the Australian Print Symposium at the National Gallery in Canberra. I showed the tattoo off there and out of that came a suggestion of whether I might be interested in leaving my skin to the gallery. The gallery already has 17 of eX de Medici’s paintings, and given the fact that she had developed into tattooing and was the first Australian ever to have a fine arts background and to have received a scholarship from the Australian government to develop her artistic interests in tattooing, it all made sense.’
The documentary explores what happens next and follows Ostling and de Medici as they negotiate curators, taxidermists, lawyers and coroners. It follows Ostling as he travels to Japan to visit the Medical Museum at the University of Tokyo and examine the skins of people who died during the Second World War. It also explores the world of tattooing in a truly unique manner. So does Ostling have any advice for people wanting to start their own bodysuit?
‘You shouldn’t go into a shop, look at a wall and go I’ll have that one. It’s like walking into a Chinese restaurant and ordering #56. You need to talk through the idea, the concept you have and then the artist themselves will do some drawings. But this is the expensive way of doing it. If you want it cheap you might as well order #56.’
Skin is the first instalment in a three part series called Anatomy which features a host of queer subjects and explores the nature of physicality. Skin airs on Tuesday April 14 at 10.05pm and is followed on April 21 with Heart. The final episode, Muscle, airs on April 28.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
