My Art practice focuses on conceptions of beauty, especially in relation to representations of the feminine. I am interested in exploring the boundaries of gendered surfaces within contemporary culture, particularly the spaces between the natural and the cultural, body and image, inside and out. My current work looks at the contrasts between ‘real’ surfaces (hair, folds of flesh, the skin) and ‘artificial’ surfaces (lace, veils, netting, tights, make-up), to explore the cultural and social significance of the adorned female body, caught in a balancing act of concealing and revealing.
Drawing on practices of print and digital, the pieces here take direct imprints from human hair, exploring the physical qualities inherent in the material itself. An abject substance, hair grows from inside the body, transgresses our rigid borders and links together life and death, cleanliness and dirt, beauty and horror. Hair is monstrous merchandise in the global marketplace; a lifeless material which can be miraculously full of body and vitality. It can be cut, curled, straightened, dyed, plucked, shaved, waxed, yet it does not bleed because it is already dead, even on our own skin. Any clippings simply become part of the body’s waste: dirty, disconnected, discarded....
This piece has the appearance of an intricate drawing, the details in each hair follicle create sketch-like marks that almost seem like movement in the work - almost as if the piece were alive although, as the artist stated, hair is very much dead.
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