XED Le Head: After tattooing, what?
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Imagine an extraordinary body of work by a dedicated tattooist, essentially an artist who, unable to use a tattoo marker, turned to something completely different. Ruby’s Rooms on the seafront (the house that’s decorated all over – and recently redecorated – using some of Xed’s designs) is showing this unique collection of work.
Xed (pronounced Zed) Le Head was revered as an innovator and expert in the world of tattooing. “A tattoo God. A Legend,” wrote Touka Voodoo of the Stockholm Alternative, a Bespoke and Holistic tattoo parlour. Xed’s work was internationally famous and his designs have been exhibited in venues as far away as Japan. He loved it and dedicated his life to it.
Soon after he met his wife Wiggy, disease began to disintegrate his spine and he was confined to a wheelchair, with only very limited use of his arms. Wiggy, however, became his carer and amanuensis. She prepared his canvases and his tubes of paint and supported him (in all senses) while he developed a way of working by squeezing paint out through what was essentially an icing tube.
He worked incessantly – the paint is thickly layered and the resulting works highly textured – and as he finished one outline in his mandala-type creations, they set it to dry and he began another, going back to the previous ones when the layers were dry. The results, all built up in this way, can be seen in this unique collection; they must be seen to be appreciated as the photo doesn’t tell even half the story.
The obvious place for the exhibition was Ruby’s Rooms on the seafront, two doors away from where Xed lived and worked and Wiggy still lives. While many actual human bodies carry his art around wherever they go, this body (of work) is left to posterity. The space at Ruby’s Rooms is enormous, another local domestic space given over to Art where the space itself becomes part of whatever is on show.
Exhibition A Tribe Called Xed:: 1 Feb 2025 Open house 1-4 pm Ruby’s Rooms TN37 5DB
RSVP [email protected]
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