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I have spent my whole life as a bigger person. I always struggled to find clothes that fit, and I was constantly disappointed with the limited options available to me.

After the birth of my second child 18 years ago, I was at my largest and was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. This quickly escalated to me having to inject medicine daily to manage it. This was a significant tipping point for me and the start of a very long journey to manage my diabetes but also to lose over 85 pounds.

Losing weight was a slow process involving different diets and exercise regimes. Eventually, I discovered an approach to eating and being active that I could realistically manage and enjoy, and it also significantly reduced my need for diabetes medication.

By spring 2022, I felt I had reached a weight with which I was content. However, I was left with considerable loose skin around my stomach area that was making me very unhappy, and no amount of weight training lessened it. I had lost a lot of weight, but I still couldn’t wear what I wanted, and I constantly dressed to cover that area of my body. I desperately wanted to be able to tuck a shirt into my trousers — but more than that, my stomach skin made everyday tasks like running up a staircase uncomfortable. I was miserable and decided to surgically remove the excess skin as the final part of my long journey.

As a contemporary artist whose practice is incredibly materials-led, I utilize unusual materials within my work to convey meaning that other materials simply wouldn’t, from animal intestines to concrete to fiber optics to gelatin and everything in between. I realized my upcoming surgery could provide an all-too-perfect opportunity to acquire a new material ― my own skin!

I knew that this was not going to be an easy process. I began by reading the U.K.’s Human Tissue Act to find out if there were any legal reasons that might stop me from being able to keep my skin once it was removed. I found nothing, so I wrote a long letter to the hospital asking for my skin to be returned to me after the operation.

The hospital agreed, but there were some conditions. The skin needed to be picked up directly after the operation because it could not be stored at the hospital for the days I would be recovering from my surgery. I asked my son and husband if they would pick it up on my behalf, and they both refused! My family is used to my strange requests, but this one was just too weird. My husband was feeling particularly worried about my surgery ― especially as it was taking place during COVID ― and dealing with my unorthodox art project was the last thing he wanted to think about.

Instead, my amazing friend and fellow artist Catalina Renjifo agreed to pick it up after work on the day of the operation. She turned up at the hospital on her push bike and delivered it to my house, where I had cleared out a drawer in my freezer to accommodate it. (I used this location in my favor, as it acted as a threat to keep my family from eating the ice cream too quickly ― “I’ll put them in the tummy bucket!”).

So, 4.5 pounds of skin sat in my freezer for nine months while I researched methods of tanning it into leather. First, I bought an at-home tanning kit, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt there was too much at risk. I had one chance at this, and doing it on my own seemed like too much responsibility. I didn’t feel confident enough that I would get it right.

I reached out to several survival courses where tanning animal skin was offered as part of the experience to see if any of them would be interested in supporting me. Unfortunately, I received several refusals ― no one wanted that responsibility, either, or they simply didn’t want to do it with human skin.

Eventually, I was sent the contact details of Theresa Emmerich Kamper, who has a Ph.D. in experimental archaeology and over 30 years of experience in prehistoric skin tanning. She jumped at the opportunity and seemed to be as excited as me about the whole prospect! We set a date in January 2023 to begin the process.

With my skin defrosted and in a bucket, I drove down to Exeter in Devon to spend a week with Teresa. We processed the skin by first scraping the fat away. It was then soaked in a bucket with tanning solution for a few days and was regularly stirred. During the last couple of days, we softened it and stretched it while drying it in Teresa’s tumble dryer!

“The grain is similar to pig skin... but this skin has single follicles rather than in groups of three,” Teresa noted. “The connective tissue between the dermis and the fat layer is the thing which is noticeably different from any species I’ve previously worked with. Really interesting!”

It was a very strange experience to see a part of my body that had been so familiar to me now completely detached, but as the week progressed, my skin became less and less me. I can still see elements and references within it ― my cesarean scar, for example ― but the texture and sight of it is so removed from being me now that it is disembodied and abstracted from my body.

Through my research, I have found no other references to human skin being processed in this way before. Nearly everything I read about human leather involved punishments from an age when human dissection was undertaken on people accused of crimes as part of their court judgment, and surgeons sometimes made use of the resulting skin to bind books. There are several examples of human skin-bound books in the U.K., including William Burke’s skin book in the Surgeons’ Hall Museums in Edinburgh or The John Horwood book in Bristol’s M Shed museum. There are also examples of human skin being kept and tanned to preserve tattoos as well as the well-known and documented horrors of the Nazis using human skin.

My art practice and current Ph.D. research explore human remains and what is left behind after death. I am interested in the space between life and death as well as the moment when someone dies, and belongings and clothes go from mundane everyday items to precious keepsakes. The work I have done with my own skin has resonated with my current research interests, especially exploring the transformation of an abhorrent object that has been sanitized and made visually less horrific.

Going into this process I was worried about what I would feel, but my experience of tanning my own skin wasn’t really what I thought it would be. I am not someone who is particularly squeamish but I did wonder how I would feel when confronted with part of myself. It felt like seeing an old friend again ― familiar but not horrific.

Humans have been preserving parts of the body or entire bodies for thousands of years. Sometimes it’s done purposefully, as with embalming, and in other instances, the conditions within the ground where the bodies were buried somehow naturally preserved them. Preserving human remains can be a part of religious ceremonies, such as funerals and burials, or it may be done for other reasons, like anatomy museums preserving specimens to enable future generations of students to learn from them.

For me, the leather tanning process was my own act of preservation. By transforming my skin in this way, I am claiming a powerful and visual reminder of my weight loss journey for myself. As a visual artist who works with materials, this felt like a very natural route for me to take. However, I do understand that this isn’t everyone’s idea of a normal process and that it might seem shocking or even gruesome to many people. Surprisingly, I have had no definitively negative comments.

During my week in Exeter, we documented the tanning process in real time on Instagram, and I was very ready for a slew of negative comments — but the majority of them were like, “What the F? Hey, wait a minute, that’s really interesting” or, “I feel so uncomfortable yet so in awe!” Teresa told me she was grateful she got to be part of such a rare opportunity and that it’s been “absolutely fascinating so far!”

I’ve decided not to make my piece of stomach leather into anything. It feels too precious to cut into and, for me, part of the story is in the shape of it as it is. However, I do anticipate I will exhibit it in some way at some point in the future. I want to find someone to make a display case for it, but at the moment, it is rolled up in a plastic bag and occasionally makes outings in my handbag when someone is keen to see it!

There are a lot of ideas to pick through now. I consider my skin leather a part of my Ph.D. research, but it also tells the personal story of my journey. The whole process has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I simply couldn’t pass up. Now I have this visceral token of my transformation that exists as a reminder of where I came from, how I got to where I am today, how incredible and resilient the human body is, and as a reminder to take care of myself.

Katie Taylor is an artist and Ph.D. researcher based in Oxford, U.K. Her work and research explore identity and individuality from unidentified human remains. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in China and Germany. She has also had a paper on her research published by the Taylor and Francis journal “Textile: Cloth and Culture.” You can find her on Instagram @bigtangle and on Twitter @bigtangle.

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The latest industry to be unexpectedly affected by AI? The tattoo artist community.

The personal tasks that ChatGPT and generative AI can do are seemingly endless, from calendar-keeping to writing essays or resumes. Now, some people are using it to come up with ideas for their next tattoo: According to Google, searches for “AI tattoo generator” are at an all-time high in the U.S. and globally.

Through paid sites like BlackInk AI and InkTune, users set the parameters for what they want out of their dream tattoo ― the objects and colors they want featured, the style they’re going for ― and AI spits out something that fits the bill. If you’re looking to get a sense of how these bots work, BuzzFeed, HuffPost’s parent company, has a basic version of an AI-assisted tattoo generator. (The trend is not to be confused with industrial robots that can ink ― one of those came out in 2016 with some fanfare.)

Tattoo artists we spoke to said the AI-created requests are slowly starting to trickle in.

Daniel Meyer, a tattoo artist on Hawaii Island, said he’s received various email requests from clients who attached AI-generated pictures to illustrate the idea they had in mind. So far, he hasn’t minded.

“It helped the client to give me a rough idea of what they had in mind regarding the general elements without them having to create matchstick-figure-like drawings to explain their vision,” he said.

Luckily, Meyer hasn’t had any clients who were dead set on their tattoos being identical to their AI-generated image. “It been more of a starting point to open up a conversation about their particular tattoo design,” he said.

That’s good, because from his experiences, the designs AI whips up are pretty generic. “They might be ‘good enough’ for many tattoo designs that are bought off the rack, but they have a distinct digital-art kinda flair but lacks the most essential component: a design that tells a story, a piece of art that has a ‘soul,’” Meyer said.

Soulless and maybe a little ethically dicey, too. A rising number of artists (as well as authors) are suing tech companies that have used their copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence programs without paying the creators. AI art replicates patterns and styles learned from existing artwork, which some consider plagiarism.

“I agree that AI-generated ‘art’ is really just a pictorial fruit salad based on the works of countless humans, which feed the algorithm with information,” Meyer said.

Still, though technically AI art “might be the biggest copyright infringement in history,” he doesn’t think art should have any copyrights to begin with.

“I myself love to incorporate elements or styles I’ve seen from other artists who work with entirely different media ― sculpturing, for example ― to bring completely new ideas to the table and to enrich my toolbox to express a particular meaning in the design,” Meyer said.

That said, a situation where a client requests an AI-created tattoo wholesale would be depressing.

“If clients feed a machine with prompts, they will miss out on a completely different dimension and perspective only an artist can have when they talk to them and get a feel for them,” Meyer said.

Steve Byrne, a tattoo artist who’s been in the industry for 27 years and works at Rock Of Ages Tattooing in Austin, Texas, hasn’t had any AI-inspired requests yet; he thinks his reputation alone will stop any new customers from bringing them in.

He worries about up-and-coming tattoo artists, though.

“Personally I feel like the human touch that is missing from AI-generated images makes it a very sad situation for less experienced or lesser-known tattooers, who may not be in the position to say no in the current economic climate,” Byrne said.

Christy Fish, the owner of Hard Case Tattoo in Portland, Oregon, thinks it all boils down to what kind of relationship the client wants to have with their tattoo artist.

“AI could diminish the value of the artist’s role in the process: The human touch, intuition and creativity that they bring to the table,” she said. “It disrespects the human connection between client and artist and substitutes true innovation with imitation.”

“Authenticity cannot be replicated by algorithms,” she added.

Fish could think of one perk of AI when it comes to tattoos: “I will admit that some of the generated art is unique and can offer options outside of the box,” she said. “But a computer doesn’t necessarily know what is tattoo-able and what is not, which will inevitably mislead clients into unreasonable expectations from their human artist.”

Of course, the elephant in the room here is that tattoo artists are used to clients coming in looking to crib something they found online.

“Most folks are still walking in with photos of real tattoos from Google or Pinterest as their go-to tat references,” said Charles Huurman, a tattoo artist in Austin, Texas. “I seriously cringe when they want an exact copy.”

The images are just reference points for most clients, though; they want Huurman’s human touch and to have something that feels more authentic to them.

Huurman said he’s fine with AI assisting at the ideation stage, but to truly nail the design, it’s all about refining those prompts, which takes practice.

“And even when you’re like it, ‘Ah, that’s almost it,’ you’ll probably still need to whip out trusty tools like Photoshop, Procreate or the good old-fashioned pencils for that final finesse,” Huurman said. “When it’s going to be on you forever, it’s gotta be spot-on.”

Like Huurman, Martin Devlin Kelly, a tattoo artist who works in Ex Machina Tattoo in London, isn’t a fan of doing exact copies of tattoos. Spotting them in the wild or on Instagram posts has become something of a pastime for him.

“My absolute favorite is when tattoo artists trace a picture of a tattoo directly without taking into account the design curving over the body,” he said. “Then the next artist traces a picture of that iteration and the distortion gets more and more pronounced each time until finally the design collapses into itself in a black hole of infinite density.”

As for AI, Devlin Kelly agrees that ultimately nothing can really substitute human creativity. He’s yet to receive such a request but given AI’s unwieldy grasp of some design elements and features ― human hands, for instance― he’s actually looking forward to it.

“I eagerly await the day someone comes in with a seven-fingered abomination,” he said. “Tattoo artists are notoriously bad at drawing hands so maybe now, finally they can say truthfully, ‘I was just following the reference!’”

MILAN (AP) — Vandals set fire and destroyed a seminal artwork by one of Italy’s most famous living artists early Wednesday outside Naples’ City Hall.

By the time flames were doused, all that was left of the installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto was a charred frame. Pistoletto’s artwork, titled “Venus of the Rags” had been display in Naples since June 28.

It featured a large plaster neoclassical nude Venus, inspired by Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s 19th century “Venus with Apple,” picking through a mountain of rags.

Pistoletto made several versions of “Venus of the Rags.” The first, in 1967, had a concrete or cement Venus purchased at a garden center covered with mica to create a glittery surface. Others used plaster casts of the that statue, and one was made out of Greek marble containing mica, according to the Tate Gallery, which owns one of the pieces.

Pistoletto told the Corriere della Sera daily newspaper that the reasons for the attack could be many.

“It is a work that calls for regeneration, on the necessity to find a balance and harmony between two minds that are represented on the one hand by beauty, and on the other by consummate consumerism, a disaster,’’ the 90-year-old artist said.

He added: “The world is going up in flames anyway. The same spirits that are waging war are the ones that set the Venus on fire. “

Pistoletto is a painter, object artist and art theorist who is one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s through which artists attacked the political, industrial and cultural establishment.