Marilyn Tattoo (Cotton Candy), 2022

This piece was originally created as a possibility for my genesis release, after I was accepted to Known Origin. I ended up putting it aside as a possibility, then made other things which I also didn’t use; I finally settled on a completely new series of Marilyns, the Morph collection, for my debut. Pop, trash and rock with Gothic touches thrown in, this one is a tribute more to contemporary Rockabilly culture than anything to do with Marilyn Monroe’s life per se. She becomes a cipher for the reinvented 1950s aesthetics of greasers, drapes and milk bar cowboys on steroids. The ‘Marilyn Tattoo’ series, which was originally released in 8 colourways on OpenSea, is certainly nice to look at but a somewhat nebulous concept compared to the ‘Marilyn Morph’ collection, which was clear in its implications of physical and mental transformation. This revisiting of Tattoo is a special release to celebrate the feature of the Morph collection on Known Origin’s front page today.