You might know Daisy Watson by her moniker @daisydoestattoos, famous as she is for almost 12 years in the tattooing game. But the Australia-born Berlin-based artist transposes her joyful naive-art style and queer symbolism onto scores of other surfaces, as well as skin. Her psychedelic flowers, mesmeric spirals, barbedwire hearts and dancing figures have worked their way into jewellery collections, graphic tees, album covers, party logos, and wall hangings in nightlife establishments across Berlin and beyond.
Thoughts and Feelings, her latest project, is a collection of paintings on silk. Recently exhibited at Backhaus Projects in Neukölln, it’s a euphoric body of work that ripples with queer imagery and wordplay, celebrating pleasure, tenderness, and connection. Painted onto these translucent squares are intimate anecdotes, snippets of song lyrics, and in-jokes from nights out/in with friends. Some lines are bold, some intricate, as Daisy depicts an ongoing search for balance “between softness and strength, calm and chaos, high and low culture, the meaningful and the meaningless”. Floating in the breeze, the silks dance, whisper to you, and beckon you in.
KALTBLUT caught up with Daisy to chat about her latest silk work, what moves her, and how she plans to satisfy her restless curiosity going forward.
KALTBLUT: You work fluidly across different surfaces and with different materials – skin, silk, silver. What’s the through line of your work?
Daisy: The through-line is probably line, to be honest. It’s all these years of drawing and using line to create my tattoo designs. Even in my paintings, there’s a strong emphasis on illustration. And with my jewellery collection for YCCIJ, it was a case of turning those lines into 3D objects. My style has changed over time, but my themes and motifs almost always stay the same. You can see flowers in basically anything I do.
You can see flowers in basically anything I do.
KALTBLUT: What sparked the lifelong obsession with flowers?
Daisy: Maybe being named Daisy has something to do with it, I don’t know! But I grew up on a property in the Gold Coast Hinterland, surrounded by acres of land and nature. My grandmother was an incredible gardener, and my dad and my brother, so I’ve always had an affinity with flowers. When I was creating Thoughts and Feelings, I was thinking about how a bunch of flowers can say a million things. It can be an apology, a congratulation, an ‘I love you’. I love that these objects can hold literally infinite amounts of words and feelings.
KALTBLUT: How did your recent silk collection Thoughts and Feelings come together? Were you building up to the show for a while?
Daisy: I came back from travelling at the start of March and basically painted the whole show in five weeks, working dusk till dawn. I had the date set, I knew I had to fill the space, and I knew I was going to do silks. I’d been thinking about it for a while and sketched out ideas while travelling. But I guess for the past few years I haven’t been able to hold onto any artworks because I’ve needed to sell what I make. Thoughts and Feelings was the first time I had the luxury of working towards a big collection.
KALTBLUT: Part of the beauty of the show was that it was so clearly intimate – “diary-like” was a phrase used in the exhibition text – but also accessible and entertaining to an outside eye.
Daisy: A lot of the designs were pulled from things that made me laugh, from D&Ms on Monday mornings, or running jokes with friends. I see intimacy as the zone that I make my work in. It’s at after parties, hanging out with friends, that I’ll be most inspired. I’ll always turn up with a sketchbook and chip away at something. So this show was interesting. It was the first time people were talking to me about what they’re getting from my work, and it’s amazing to have them walk away from it with that feeling of intimacy.
KALTBLUT: In your statement for the show, you wrote about the importance of “polarities”: “softness and strength, calm and chaos”, etc. You can really see this duality in your imagery – your barbedwire hearts, for example. Could you expand on this?
Daisy: Something I always talk about with my partner and my friends is the existence of both masculine and feminine energy; how everything is a combination of two sides, a balance of things. It inflects every artwork I make, even the colours I combine. Wherever there’s a swirl, there’s a spike. And you can apply that to everything in life. My favourite food is sweet and salty. I’ll just as easily enjoy an expensive bottle of natural wine as I will a can of coke in a gutter. I like being flexible to all sides.
KALTBLUT: And I guess the highs and lows of life as well.
Daisy: Definitely. My mum really instilled in me that life is full of seasons and nothing lasts forever. As an adult, I’ve learned that there are going to be shit times, but the best thing to do is to ride that feeling and not run away from it, because the only way is through. It really does apply to everything: joy and sadness, depression and euphoria.
As an adult, I’ve learned that there are going to be shit times, but the best thing to do is to ride that feeling and not run away from it, because the only way is through.
KALTBLUT: From the very act of tattooing to the materials you’re manipulating, touch, tactility, and movement also feel like major aspects of your work.
Daisy: Once the jewellery was in play, it was like wow, there are infinite dimensions I want to work with. Even with silk, there’s nothing rigid about it. It’s like an organic form – it moves, it floats. The same with ink on the body, it’s always moving. Before I got into art in my final years of high school, I was a full-time dancer. Then I burnt out and went from dancing six days a week to zero, and that’s when I really started to take drawing more seriously. But I’ve carried that dynamism with me.
KALTBLUT: Would you ever create on a blank canvas now?
Daisy: I spent years doing that because I was trying to break out of tattooing for so long. I’ve done a lot of lino prints on paper and canvas, but it always felt like an uphill battle. When I learnt to paint on silk, it flowed differently, and something just clicked. One of my good friends is a tattoo artist, but he used to be a painter. He stored all his paintings in his dad’s basement – years and years of work – and it totally flooded out and everything got destroyed, and it was so tragic. He had this epiphany that led him into tattooing and away from creating these big, chunky objects that take up space. I think that conversation really stuck with me. There’s so much stuff in the world, and these silks I’m painting, they can fold into an envelope, but at the same time can fill a wall. I love that part of it.
KALTBLUT: You’ve produced a lot of artwork for EPs, party collectives and record labels – Radiant Records especially. What’s your connection to music as an art form, and how does it relate to your work?
Daisy: I often feel like the last non-DJ in the city, and I’m stubbornly making a stand that I’m not even going to try, you know, because someone has to not be a DJ in Berlin! But I’ve always loved music, going back to dancing as well, it’s just something I keep close in whatever way I can. I feel very lucky to have such proximity to people who are making music, and I definitely respond well when labels or parties have a strong aesthetic, so it’s amazing to contribute to that.
KALTBLUT: And if you could describe your style in a handful of words?
Daisy: Connection. Hopefully fun but deep. Not taking itself too seriously. Especially when I think about my tattooing process, people have to be in this really spontaneous moment, and just choose a flash from a book that speaks to them on the day. That spontaneity carries into everything I create. It’s better not to think too much about it, to just trust yourself in terms of what speaks to you aesthetically.
KALTBLUT: What’s next for you?
Daisy: I don’t think I’m ever satisfied for that long, to be honest. Every couple of years it’s me cherry-picking YouTube videos, figuring out how to do this new thing. There’s obviously tattooing, which I fell into when I was 19, back in the era of snapping Biros open and putting sewing needles under flames and crazy shit like that. I’ve got silk painting down, and using an airbrush on clothing. My next thing is to teach myself how to work with stained-glass.
I have no idea how it’s going to turn out, and maybe it won’t, but I like learning technically just how to do things, and figuring out the rest. The beauty’s in the mistakes and the naivety of it all. I feel like I’ve been standing on the fringes of the art world for a while, but I don’t really want to enter it to the point that I need to schmooze or make compromises. I’m just going to keep making work that I like, and let things unfold from there.
The beauty’s in the mistakes and the naivety of it all.
Photos – Amaan Hassen and Rachel Israela
Follow @daisy___watson on Instagram to keep up with her artwork, and @daisydoestattoos for her tattoos.
Madeleine Pollard is a writer based in Berlin. Follower her on Instagram @madeleine.pollard to keep up with her work.
