It’s Getting Hairy

Jarrett Key, a Brooklyn-based musician, performer, and visual artist, was startled from their sleep by the sound of their late grandmother, Ruth Mae Giles’s, voice.
“Your hair is your strength, paint with your hair,” they heard in her voice, encompassing the room and their mind. When the sun rose, they knew what needed to be done.
Transforming their hair into a paintbrush and dipping their head in black paint, Key recreated gestures of their grandmother, letting her voice continue to guide their movements.

The use of hair in artwork spans back centuries, flourishing in the Victorian Era. However, contemporary artists are finding new ways to work with hair, using it as a tool for painting, turning it into a sculpture, or crafting a performance with it. “Your hair is your strength,” is a testament that rings true to a number of these contemporary artists.
Hair both grows and falls out; “good hair days” and “bad hair days” rule our mood; beauty standards idolize luscious locks as well as baby-smooth skin. Hair in all its forms is full of complexities, and these artists use their work as a meditation on these contradictions, a grasp at finding answers.

Key performing “Hair Painting 37” in for NYC Pride 2023 at Marsha P. Johnson Park. Photo courtesy of Jarrett Key

Preparing the dead
A number of artists are inspired by Victorian mourning hairwork, which uses the hair of a deceased loved one to create rings, lockets, brooches, bracelets, and framed works. Some artists, inspired by this theme of mourning, combined their mourning of global issues or losses to create their work.
Loren Schwerd, for example, creates sculptures of houses in New Orleans left abandoned after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, mourning the people and communities lost to the disaster.
Schwerd says she seeks to “use that tradition as a way of reaching back in time and drawing parallels between then and now.”
The hair she used in her sculptures was dumped on the curb of a beauty shop that flooded from the storm. Schwerd routinely upcycles found materials, such as wood, plastic, and fishing line. The pile of hair, however, was much more absurd and alluring than the usual materials she finds, spurred a contemplation on the tragedy that left it as merely a pile of trash.
“With the hair, that was the first time I really started thinking, very consciously, ‘What is this doing here? Why is it here? Why is it so abundant? Why is it so unusual that it would be here? What is the context or situation that put this material here?’”

Guadalupe Campos, a Boston-based visual artist also draws inspiration from Victorian hair artwork.
“If someone dies, you cut a piece of their hair and you make a ring or a bracelet or you put it in a locket,” explains Campos. “Recently I was thinking about my work in the context of me and my studio being like a mortuary where I’m preparing the dead.”

“Let’s Age Like Trees” by Guadalupe Campos. Photo courtesy of Guadalupe Campos

While Victorian hair art memorialized the dead, he twists the mourning of death to the hope of rebirth and preservation of memory.
“The hair is both a token and a recorder of the performance of cutting the hair, and shedding this version of that person,” says Campos. “I like to reference the hair lines to the grain of wood. They’re both something that was once alive and now is dead. [They’re both] markers of time, the length of the hair tells you how long the person has been keeping the hair growing.” OR “It can be a really positive, ‘I’m so glad you’ve gone through this change,’ but it can also represent the hardships that person has gone through before deciding to cut off the hair.”

Braiding stories
Hair growth depicts the passage of time, the action of cutting hair demonstrates renewal, and the locks of discarded hair themselves represent the people they once belonged to, and all the memories this person may share with the artist who employs their hair.
Hair fiber artist Jayoung Yoon, for example, uses hair from herself as well as family members. In her piece, “Web of Life,” she intertwined hair from immediate and extended family members to represent their connection in life. Her series “The Offering Bowl” uses her mother’s hair, expressing the cycle of life and the importance her mother played in her art..

“The Offering Bowl 07” by Jayoung Yoon. Photo courtesy of Jayoung Yoon

In this piece, Yoon collected hair her mother had lost.
“Hair comes from my body and then it falls off – that kind of represents death,” she explains. “But then I make hair sculptures, which gives it new life.”
Yoon’s mother was a performance artist and dancer, who used physicality to relieve herself and audiences of trauma. She performed for Korean Comfort Women, women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces during World War II, inspiring them to release pain through physical expression.
“At the end of the performance, she invited them to dance together. I think they kind of healed through the body movements,”
Yoon, inspired by her mother’s work of physical healing, works with hair to emphasize “body sensation and meditation.” Her work is a reflection on past experiences of herself, her family, and her culture.

Multimedia artist Emily Rose’s work has a similar goal – providing generational healing via hair. She collects the memories and experiences of the Puerto Rican diaspora through “pelitos,” or the cut-off pieces of hair, as her mother would refer to them. Both of Rose’s parents were hairdressers, and their kitchen was the salon for Rose and her siblings.
Making her piece, “Pelitos,” Rose collected the hair of herself, friends, and family to demonstrate the beauty of their natural hair despite societal norms that say otherwise.
“The whole installation is talking about hair stories, it’s talking about lived experiences, and I want to incorporate not my lived experience, but I want to incorporate my sisters, my mother, other people from the diaspora because I feel like this memory, this installation didn’t happen in my kitchen alone, it happened in other people’s kitchens as well.”

“El Salon” Installation by Emily Rose. Photo by Jose Miguel Gomez-Pleitez

Hair activism
Several of these artists use their hairworks as a response to oppressive beauty norms engrained by both culture and family.
Multimedia artist Baseera Khan’s hair sculptures and installation also act as an opposition to the painful hold hair can have on people.
In response to their journey with hair – a battle with personal autonomy, cultural heritage, and Eurocentric norms — Khan built “Braidrage.” In this piece, they built a 15-foot rope of braid and molded the corners of their body to create climbing mounds. When they perform this piece, they use the braid to climb upon these corners of themselves. The maneuvers of their body and tools – all covered in dark chalk – create the final painting.
Their installation is “about endurance, about mark-making, about using my body as a drawing tool.”

Khan performing “Braidrage” at Albany Museum at The University of Albany in 2019. Photo by Ariana Sarwari

The process of making and performance not only inspires but requires a trance-like state, a state which Khan believes most people are devoid of, yet is the only way to truly experience creativity and consciousness.
“It’s not a passive state, it’s a subconscious state,” they say. “Allow for your intuition to lead you”
In exhausting themselves by climbing upon their own body, Khan is looking at the circle of rage beauty standards put female presenting bodies in. Beauty standards turn physical normalities, even necessities – such as hair – into societal abominations, spurring self-hatred. However, once we can become aware of the culture that incites these thoughts, our hate spirals towards this culture as a whole. But who are we if not a member of the culture, and it’s hard to close out messages that have been engrained for generations. So we continue the self-hatred. Hatred directed inner and outer, a cycle of rage that traps women in hamster wheels, running until we’re exhausted – much like Khan feels climbing the corners of her body in the installation.
“We’re taught to not have rage, we’re taught to be controlled.” Rage, much like hair is a natural factor of being a human that vilifies women. But when rage inevitably comes, for women who are taught to control it, it feels freeing.
“Rage is another trance state,” they say.

Growing from the roots
Generations before us have informed what we know and how we process this, but present minds and creatives use these lessons to evolve on what has been established. Hair started as an artistic symbol of death, but contemporary artists have found ways for it to encompass life, enliven emotion, and spur rebirth.
“[Looking] back on histories and cultures that help us shape the way we see ourselves and shape and practice the materials that we use,” expresses Key,”How do you take all of this information and push it forward for the next generation. How are you evolving it? How are you really trying to innovate?”
For some, like Khan, that means honoring the natural hair on their bodies.
“I used to pluck it, now I don’t give a f*ck,” they say, “I celebrate my eyebrows, I celebrate the hair on my arms.”