Exhibition | Skin Show: The Art and Rite of Tattoo

FREE ADMISSION | GALLERY OPEN: Wednesday to Sunday 10.30am – 3.30pm | Closed Monday, Tuesday & Public Holidays
Open for Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers Monday 18 & Tuesday 19 September

“They have a custom of staining their bodies, nearly in the same manner as is practised in many other parts of the world, which they call Tattowing.” So the literary gentleman John Hawkesworth wrote about the Tahitian islanders met by Lieutenant James Cook and the botanist Joseph Banks in 1769. Banks himself got tattooed in Tahiti.

Books based on Cook’s Pacific voyages profoundly affected the spread of tattooing across the world. This exhibition displays rare voyage journals held in the Lionel Lindsay Gallery and Library Collection to explore the art and rite of tattoo.

Exhibition on display 26 August - 22 October.

Image: T. CHAMBERS after S. PARKINSON / The head of a chief of New Zealand … 1773 / engraving in Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in His Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour … London, 1773 / Lionel Lindsay Gallery and Library Collection