Timeless Thrills is pleased to present Five Lives in One, a solo exhibition by Permanent Mark bringing together tufted rugs, functional furniture, and pen-and-ink works. Drawing from more than four decades of image-making, travel, and experimentation, the exhibition offers a look at Mark’s multidisciplinary practice as it exists today.

WORKS   INSTALLATION VIEWS

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Permanent Mark

Gallery Statement

Five Lives in One presents the current work of Permanent Mark, bringing together tufted rugs, functional furniture, and pen-and-ink drawings from an artist whose practice has been built through more than four decades of making.

There is no single medium that defines Mark’s career. Film, tattooing, printmaking, collage, sculpture, cyanotype, painting, textiles, and drawing have entered his practice at different points, often with one leading directly into another. That movement isn’t incidental to the work. It is fundamental to the way Mark operates: learn something, push it, take what is useful, and keep moving.

The tufted works carry histories that extend well beyond Mark’s recent use of the medium. Born in Libya and raised in part in Algeria, he remembers rugs as a constant presence in the markets of his childhood. Decades later, he returned to the form through tufting. Japanese, Polynesian, and Borneo influences—cultures and visual traditions Mark encountered and immersed himself in through years of tattooing and travel—now move through these works in the form of warriors, traditional tattoo imagery, ornament, and intricate pattern.

As his command of tufting developed, Mark began pushing the medium beyond the wall and floor. Rugs became components of furniture. Tufted surfaces entered wooden chairs and benches, bringing textile work, craftsmanship, and functional objects together. It follows an instinct present throughout his career: once a medium becomes familiar, find somewhere else to take it.

Alongside these works are Mark’s pen-and-ink drawings, perhaps the most persistent medium in his practice. Their roots stretch back to boarding school in London and the fountain pens he was required to use as a student. What he once hated eventually became something he could claim as his own. Other mediums and subjects continue to change, but drawing remains an absolute—something Mark can always return to.

The title Five Lives in One comes directly from the way Mark understands his own life. He describes himself as currently living his fourth, approaching a fifth and final life that extends through the end and whatever follows. Each has brought different places, circumstances, disciplines, successes, failures, and ways of making.

The exhibition does not attempt to package those experiences into a retrospective or force the work into a single narrative. This is Permanent Mark as he exists now.

Five lives. One artist. Still working.

Artist Bio

Permanent Mark is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans more than four decades of image-making across film, tattooing, painting, printmaking, collage, textiles, and mixed media.

Mark began his professional creative career in Southern California in the 1980s, working in film as a scenic painter before progressing into production design. In 1989, he began tattooing at Venice Tattoo, launching a career that would take him across several continents and place him within some of the most influential tattoo communities of the period.

He later established a tattoo shop in Cape Town, South Africa, before relocating to Amsterdam to work alongside Henk Schiffmacher. In the mid-1990s, Mark traveled throughout Asia before eventually settling in Tokyo, where he spent time with Japanese tattoo master Horiyoshi III in Yokohama, talking tattooing and gaining insight from his experience.

During seven years in Japan, Mark continued expanding his creative practice beyond tattooing. He developed work in apparel and publishing, organized the Tokyo Tattoo Conventions of 1999 and 2000, and presented his artwork through a series of solo exhibitions. These experiences became part of a practice that increasingly moved between tattooing, art, design, and other forms of image-making.

After more than 30 years in tattooing, Mark stepped away from the profession to focus fully on a multidisciplinary studio practice that had developed alongside his tattoo career. Working across painting, collage, silkscreen, sculpture, textiles, cyanotype, and mixed media, his work brings together techniques and imagery accumulated through decades of making, experimentation, and travel.

Rather than treating these periods as separate careers, Mark’s current practice draws from their collective history, allowing the imagery, processes, and experiences of one creative life to continually inform the next. His continual movement between mediums remains central to the way he works—learning, experimenting, and finding new ways to translate a lifetime of visual experience into what comes next.

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Opening Reception

Sat, Sep 5, 2026 | 6-9pm
Opening Reception Photo Recap

On View

Sep 5 - Oct 17, 2026

Exhibition Links

Press Release
Studio Visit
Catalog of Works
Installation Views

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