Exploring instinctive behaviour and abject, reflexive responses, these ‘hairification’ pieces arose from another maternal role, nit combing. Allogrooming, or grooming of another individual is the social cement of the primate world: reinforcing social structures and family links, it is involved in building relationships, bonding, establishing hierarchies, and reconciliation after conflicts. Those who groom are thought to be more caring and committed to those they groom.
Pared down to varnish and a few hairs, I voluntarily retract to base position in order to re-establish a language from which a view of the world then naturally expands outwards again. Neither fully dead nor fully alive, hair has made the journey from inside to out. I tend the waste hair my body has shed, my extended attention giving it new form and value. The value of time and the implicit weight of time and effort taken in making is a central tenet of my practice. I laboriously control the unwilling material to create works that are nevertheless quickly absorbed by the eye, exploring this temporal dichotomy. The convention of the postcard as a conveyor of personal messages disregarded by the strangers who handle them, addresses the intimate within the public, the fragility of self with the fragility of culture. These individual works are being distributed to be posted back to me.
