Female empowerment, body positivity, self-identity and reconciled trauma take intimate form in Reka Nyari’s “Ink Stories” series, featuring large-scale nude photographs of fully tattooed women who have faced adversity.
Now, Nyari brings a unique format to NYC’s Fremin Gallery with her latest “Ink Stories” project, “Punctured Ink.”
“I remembered my parents had this big pad of paper next to the home phone in Finland and I would use my mother’s sewing needles to poke patterns into the paper,” Nyari says.
Through the process of puncturing botanical-like references into each image, Nyari makes each photographic print truly one-of-a-kind. But more than patterns and shapes, the punctures suggest a deeper meaning to tattooing.
Unlike painting or drawing, the raised, brail-like holes are truly permanent in the same vein as a tattoo on one’s skin. While tradition says to preserve a work of art—and likewise, the skin—in its pure form, Nyari follows in her subjects’ footsteps by purposely altering the medium to create a new narrative from lived experience. “When talking about scarification and getting over trauma, to me, nature is one of the most healing and beautiful elements,” she says.
Like her previous “Ink Stories,” “Punctured Ink” tells the story of one woman. “[‘Punctured Ink’] features a French-Vietnamese woman Anh who is a beautiful, free-spirited, nature-loving artist and muse,” Nyari told HVY. “Each woman has come to me in a different way…Through friends or many times, through the webs of social media.”
She adds, “I love shooting people. I have no interest in still life or landscapes. I am actually most interested in the story of a person, not specifically their nude body. It is just that a tattooed, scarred, lived-in body has just so much to say, I want to capture it all.”
Duggal Visual Solutions has been Nyari’s printing partner from the beginning of “Ink Stories,” when the first installment, “Geisha Ink,” became a breakthrough solo exhibition for the model-turned-photographer. Nyari recently exhibited “Blooming Ink” in Istanbul and took both the Black and White and Fine Art categories in the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards for “Mother Ink.”
“Punctured Ink,” sponsored by Duggal, is on display at Fremin Gallery in NYC through October 30, with a possible live art puncturing session to be announced. Learn more and visit www.rekanyari.com to see the rest of the “Ink Stories” series.
