swing (2011)
human hair, string, found wood, nails

two braids cut in india and australia and an unknown ponytail (2011)
human hair, found wood, nails

That the hair belonged to someone else explained to me my compulsion to collect it. In a time of frequent separation from people close to me, I was trying to keep them physically near; or created connections with new people by having them share (literally) an intimate piece of themselves with me, an act which demonstrated my own sureness I’d soon be separated from them too.

I was shaking when I opened the bags of hair clippings that for years sat dormant to find they still held the smell of the person. Something beyond my own disgust at the texture (even of my own chopped-up hair) made manipulating the loose material difficult—it felt like violation. A few times I even felt like I should ask the person if it was okay that I display a dead part of them.

I was surprised how tenderly I handled the hair as material, how I gasped when I dropped a piece of it--as if it were a fleshy part of a person falling to the ground--or as if my own hair were coming out in my fingers.

pinned series (2011)
human hair, found wood, nails

"the complicated sense memory of someone else's hair"

-- Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

abeyance (2011)
human hair, glass

tagged (2011)
human hair, canvas, thread

pinned series (2011)
human hair, found wood, nails