"The Soldier's Skin" is the fruit of Heffernan's three-month tour of duty in Twentynine Palms. It started as a smaller project that she worked on for High Desert Test Sites, based in Joshua Tree, an annual arts festival with the objective of creating better understanding of the desert through site-specific artworks. But long before this project, Heffernan, a former military wife, had indelible memories of Twentynine Palms -- its culture, its juxtapositions. "I had been going out there as an artist for years, but I always felt a little odd when I went to Joshua Tree because I had another association with the high desert," Heffernan says. She had moved to California with her then-husband, a Navy flight surgeon who'd been sent to Twentynine Palms for combat maneuver training. It was Heffernan's first glimpse of the terrain.
Indelible ink
A photography exhibit shows Marine tattoos as eulogies to the lost.
"So when I went out in the desert, I not only had these art associations with Twentynine Palms but just over the hill was this haunting presence of Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center," she says. "I felt it was kind of a looming, ominous presence that had real effects in my early understanding of what the California landscape was about."
When Heffernan proposed this project, her idea was to make "site specific" work focused on the "site" of "the bodies of these young Marines coming back from the war. It would be an understanding of land but not disassociated with the people who use it" -- the military community, the tattoo artists, the desert inhabitants in general. "As I returned to the desert to witness how these young men were memorializing their dead brothers, as they call them, they bridged a gap in opening themselves to me."
Over three months, she broke down one barrier and then the next, and got to know the land and the people intimately. She pitched her tent in the desert because she couldn't afford to stay in a hotel for such a protracted period. "There were two blizzards while I was there! Snow on my tent," Heffernan says. But she knew being a constant presence was the only way that she could build rapport with the tattoo artists and ultimately the Marines.
In time, she was able to form close relationships with about 10 of the parlors and the artists who worked in them, on or just off California State Route 62 -- Twentynine Palms Highway. "They were the locus point," Heffernan explains. "Also, I didn't want to start with the military's office because I thought that that would be more a closed door," Heffernan says. "And the tattoo parlors were the middle ground where I actually wanted to photograph them."
