Maria Viirros presents the issue and gives us an insight into their reflections on how to approach the role as editor. With this issue, Viirros wants to create a space in which the reader can peek into the rich field of body arts, its histories, contours, and possibilities, while providing the artists with a platform to reflect upon their practices from a perspective that is not commonly considered when their work is discussed.

Jannicke Wiese-Hansen and Tor Ola Svennevig invite you into their studio to talk about their craft, promoting Norwegian art and culture, as well as taking their Nordic culture back from the abuse of the extremist right. The two tattoo artists have also written short artist presentations about their personal journeys within the tattoo field.

Holistic tattooer Touka Voodoo takes us through his personal journey — from Tehran, through London — to his tattoo studio in Stockholm. In this text, Touka Voodoo reflects on how redesigning and remaking the exterior body has been a continuous journey to match the interior and manifest the inner person. Even though his work is known to provoke, provocation has never been his aim - but rather, the goal is to liberate the human body from shame, and through introspection, become one´s own personal ´superbeing´.

In this text, Marita Wikstrøm Svěrák introduces us to the field of body piercings, scarification, and body suspension. She explains the craftsmanship behind the different practices, as well as her fascination with scars and the importance of pain. Throughout the text, the artist gives insight into the social and psychological part of her work and explains how it is deeply embedded within her practice.

Maya Sialuk Jacobsen writes about the complexities of taking back Inuit tattoo traditions, a practice born and developed within a culture of collectivism, now practiced and re-assembled in a growing individualistic culture. Sialuk Jacobsen asks: ‘How do Inuit tattoos create both a new verbal and visual language?’

In this essay art critic and writer Nicholas Norton reflects upon the blurring lines between fine art and crafts in the contemporary art scene in Norway. He looks at Ahmed Umar’s show Glowing Phalanges at Kunstnernes Hus (2023), Unweaving the Binary Code at Kunsthall Trondheim (2022) and Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzels exhibition at BO, On Lycanthropy, fabulation and weaving spells (2023). Norton examines the shows use of performativity and sound, and he arguments on how crafts is an increasingly elastic category, capable of merging different critical perspectives that are not simply beholden to traditions of making, and can be a way of “making” new perspectives on the world.

In this text, Sebastian Rusten looks at the ancient art of spruce root basket weaving to reflect upon his artistic practice, which relates and communicates with a non-human world through foraging and craft.