Personal Growth, 2018 (detail). Artist’s hair sewn into fine art print.
Made from human hair sewn into photos of home spaces, “Hair Pieces” grapple with repetition, domesticity, and death. They present a manic and grotesque inhabitation of pristine, quiet kitchen and living spaces, which become overgrown with hair collected from my (the artist’s) head. Painstakingly stitched into the photo, the hair plays with form and medium: from a distance it appears like a drawing on a photograph, only to be clearly viewed as hair up-close, often with lint, dust, and other matter caught in it. The movements of the hair are illustrative in quality, as if to suggest that they are manifestations of viewer’s imagination and the overwhelming threat of mortality.
Personal Growth, 2018. Artist’s hair sewn into fine art print.
Reflecting my experience with estrangement, these works represent in part the inescapability of my nuclear family, but also the inability to articulate fully the sense of danger or dis-ease within that home.
Room, 2019. Artist’s hair sewn into photograph.
12 Toasters is series within Hair Pieces featuring twelve iterations of the same photo, each illustrated differently with hair. More about 12 Toasters can be found here.
12 Toasters, 2018-2021. Artist’s hair sewn into twelve identical photos, picture frames.
Photographs by Paul Takeuchi.
“Hair Pieces” is based on photos of Capital Studios by Diego Padilla Magallanes.