Scene VII: Hair

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, November 2024

“There’s a lot of power in hair”

— Vodka, drag performer and professional wig stylist, in BBC online, There’s a lot of power in hair: The importance of wigs in the world of drag, 17 October 2022.

PROLOGUE

This essay is about hair. Its gloss and ick; its power and fragility. Many of these words were written during the final furlongs of the US Presidential election; itself a fragile contest, both polished yet abominable, aimed at securing power. Much of the debate between the two candidates centred on several issues, all of which have, at least, a whiff of synergy with the content of this Scene and essay. Hair – that indexical equivalent of the devilishly chameleonic David Bowie – offers up numerous tributaries of signification. It can stress and deconstruct tropes of femininity and masculinity whilst celebrating the two in their fusion; it possesses its own libidinal energy that can eroticize and fetishize its ‘host’. Hair also speaks specifically to pillars of race and the vagaries of both institutional religion and the less schematized drift of spirituality. Finally, hair – like politics and its underlying labyrinth of criss-crossing ideologies – can quickly (zoo)morph from one design to another (depending on the circumstances that colour one’s attention on it) and is, like most politics and some politicians, easily manipulated. Cut, shorn, coiffed, shaved, blown, woven or wigged, hair radiates both the glow and lustre of presence whilst still able to induce the dry wretch of the abject. The difference between admiring the luscious locks of a Hollywood bouffe and finding one of those hairs nestled in your cheeseburger. This essay, inspired (and not a little deflated) by the recent election in America, will therefore explore this shared currency, nurtured by the tenets yet variegation of structures and struggles of and for identity, truth and, ultimately, love and mull over how such shifts of signification – some dramatic; others nuanced – when seen through the lens of hair colour any threads of meaning when untangled by the seven different artists that make up this Scene.

Faisal Abdu'Allah, Hairtrait Jordan, 2022, Hair and acrylic on birch veneer plywood, 101.6 x 127 cm (40 x 50 in)

I: Faisal Abdu’Allah

We begin our journey at the barbershop. Faisal Abdu’Allah is an artist whose practice is inspired by his own Afro-British, working-class life as well as his Muslim faith. His is a multidisciplinary practice that embraces printmaking, photography and performance. He is also a barber and the physical act of cutting hair – the performance of it and the relics that provides - is key to any appreciation of his work. Abdu’Allah often refers to childhood memories of visiting the barbershop: a space that was, for him, specifically Black and male and one established for physical transformation. It is this propensity for change, the dynamo of which is articulated by an environment devoted to unpicking and celebrating Black identity, that fuels much of Abdu’Allah’s focus here on race and masculinity: both being concepts prone to stereo-typification which, in turn, raise questions about matrices of power, representation and their authorship.

It is both the trauma and its recovery, reverberations that line and temper these orbits of experience, that sit at the forefront of Faisal Abdu’Allah’s hairtraits. ‘Hair’ and ‘trait’ as a compound word offer us a combination of that innocuous, everyday stuff that sits so visibly as ‘style’ and yet so invisibly as ‘substance’ on almost every single person’s head (at some point in their life) but is now fused with a sense of something more particular, far more characteristic. A hairtrait is then something of an oxymoron, wobbling between commonality and specificity; between the complexities of race and gender and the tributary of individual personality (in this object’s case, a young man called Jordan). Hairtrait: Jordan (2022) may speak with broad strokes to Abdu’Allah’s ongoing exploration into race, class and faith, but it concerns itself directly with notions of regeneration. Jordan is one of eight boys who had experienced a specific trauma and who all ‘sat’ for the artist by agreeing to have their hair cut by him. The performance of cutting and clipping their hair was then followed by all eight of the boys’ hair being collected simultaneously and mixed together with the artist’s own hair, in so doing echoing the African principle of Ubuntu: the joining together of your humanity with another’s. It is with this hair – a combination of all the sitters and the artist, their separate angst and their collective desire for change – that Abdu’Allah then creates his surfaces. The result are images that chronicle the conquest of hope and empowerment over adversity and serve as a reminder that – in these endless moments – the artist and his subjects become inextricably and powerfully connected. Abdu’Allah is, and always will be, in and with these young men.

Each portrait is printed on a painted plywood support with this hair mix; each strand now chopped down into miniscule shards of hair. The visual effect they radiate is not unlike looking at a pointillist painting, where the task is to both observe each sovereign mark yet appreciate their coalescence as a holistic surface. Occupying the central axis of the support and pushed to the front of the pictorial space, Jordan - as object – operates as a homogenous whole, however, upon very close inspection one can see that the printed grisaille of the painted surface is neither ink nor paint, but hair. So it is that Jordan – as subject – is depicted as a sum of a million little pieces, some of them inherent to him, others acquired from other people or sources. For Abdu’Allah, the very act of cutting hair is thus an act of reclamation, a clean wipe of the slate. The emotional vulnerability of these young men, mirrored in the fragility of the hair that they give up, now nourishes a different perspective on the assumed androcentricity of the specifically Black barbershop and the performances (and rebirth) that space uniquely and ultimately provides.

Fiza Khatri, 786, 2022, Oil on canvas, 30.5 x 25.4 cm (12 x 10 in)

II: Fiza Khatri

The signification of gender as observed through the lens of hair is as old as time. Eve has lots of it; Adam has some. The bending of it – both the signifier of hair and the scaffold of gender – is a more recent phenomenon. It is this malleability of meaning - in an already complex pool of critical discussion - that makes hair so difficult to grasp. Like Abdu’Allah’s hairtraits, Fiza Khatri’s 786 (2022) further explores the many machinations of masculinity. A close-up of an assumed man’s chest sees clumps of hair congregate together to form a tiny copse, offering sanctuary to a gold necklace with a small medallion on it. It reads ‘Allah’, however, that text carries with it a multitude of possible interpretations. Here, the sentiment is concerned with inner strength and how that strength can be used to support others.

Manliness is often associated with pilosity and, specifically, with hairy chests (especially those embellished with chained medallions). Yet here Khatri has very quickly transformed that stream of masculinity (both as subject and object), now enunciating it not as a form of portraiture but of landscape. Not as a person but as a place. The difference is telling. The act of abbreviation denies the surface its ‘who’, instead amplifying its ‘how’ and ‘why’. Khatri’s surface now begins to sing as an abstraction which, by extension, allows the hair as sign to swim about in different directions and dimensions of signifier and signified. The viewer is thus caught out trying to force an efflorescence of dark brown marks fanned across a tanned surface to become a manly chest, yet we are reminded by Khatri that all we observe is merely a painted support. The hyper-masculinity of the sign and its (now abandoned) figuration is thus remoulded into one that Khatri refers to as a ‘sacred landscape’: a space that ebbs between noun and verb, between flesh and fiction. What is finally privileged is not a statement about masculinity per se, but about how that structure – as fluid as it is - can be determined and energised. The disentanglement of it from any shape of figuration serves to nurture the possibilities it – as a larger temple to selfhood – so eloquently provides under Khatri’s clever direction.

III: Natalia González Martín

If Abdu’Allah and Khatri’s focus on hair exposes a certain frangibility to the prism of masculinity, then Natalia González Martín’s work offers an alternative rhythm of thought and application. González Martin’s focus is on the female figure and, spanning millennia and many cultures, womanhood has been rendered, in various degrees of poesy, via confessions of hair. Think on the myths of Eve, the Virgin Mary or Rapunzel. The flowing locks of Botticelli’s Venus; all those Pre-Raphaelite redheads and Frida Kahlo’s generous eyebrow. Hair has for time immemorial signified femininity in all its power and grace and González Martín continues that exploration in her achingly beautiful work: paintings that exhale a certain ideogrammatic, egg-tempera-ed ‘Renaissanceness’ that makes them feel truly and exquisitely trapped in time, oblivious to the chaos of the now.

Natalia González Martín, She Showed Great Love, 2024, Oil on panel, 30 x 20 cm (11 3/4 x 7 7/8 in)

She Showed Great Love (2024) takes its inspiration from the figure and narrative of Mary Magdalene. She is a figure who embraces both the stature and struggle of the feminine. Formerly a prostitute, Mary was vilified by her contemporaries but would go on to follow Christ and, famously, having fallen at his feet at the House of Simon, wetting them with her own tears, would then wash and dry them with her own, extremely long hair: “Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.” (The Bible, King James Version, John, 12:3). González Martín depicts Mary Magdalene tenderly drying Jesus’ foot as she quietly weeps. The poise and precision of her pose and predicament chiming perfectly with the artist’s flawless, almost brushless application.

Understanding or, better still, interrogating the dynamic of femininity via Mary Magdalene’s voice offers a further layer to the multifaceted signification of hair. The Bible states that, following the crucifixion and then resurrection of Christ, the already long-haired saint left Jerusalem and went on to live an ascetic solitary life in the desert. There she began to grow hair all over her body to the point she was almost lycanthropic (at least in coat, if not in temperament). Such abundance of hair is regarded as a sign of Mary’s need to protect her modesty (as she didn’t wear much, if anything at all, in the burning desert) and honour. By extension her hirsute body, whilst at odds with any usual understanding of femininity, thus becomes the very essence of her faith: both her strength and her weakness. All the while this body hair still points to the animal, the feral and, even, the demonic, so that – according to The Bible at least – women are presented as simultaneously graceful yet devilish through the language of hair. If anything, González Martín’s painting puts paid to any such reading of her Mary Magdalene. The opalescent surface, conjured by the most delicate painterly touch, caresses the figure into gentle life. This Mary remains perfectly at ease with herself, a paragon of beauty that slips through the annals of time and offers just a tiny volt of fetishist zip in the delicate manner of her rather winsome feet worshipping.

Leo Costelloe, Closer to God, 2024, Brilliant white cut diamonds, sterling silver and honey auburn synthetic weft, 49 x 36 x 38 cm (19 1/4 x 14 1/8 x 15 in)

IV: Leo Costelloe

Hair not only marks status but can become its very own ‘status symbol’. Samurais were easily spotted because of their topknots; monks lauded for constantly relinquishing themselves to God with their tonsured heads. However, where real power is signified in hair is when one adorns a wig. The cult of Marie Antoinette fizzes as much in the fantasy of her increasingly elaborate wigs as in anything else. The same could be said for any number of depictions of French Emperors, all of them lavishly decked out in the most opulent of robes, adorned with wigs that look like they belong to Mary Magdalene herself.

Leo Costelloe draws on such energy and spectacle in his work, usually in glass, metal or silversmithing. Closer to God (2024) marries a honey auburn-coloured wig with a hair piece, fashioned from sterling silver and embellished with brilliant white cut diamonds. The contest between the soft, silky locks of the wig and the hard, metallic silver (shaped into a bow that quietly morphs from ribbon to fork) is quite deliberate. Their contrast somehow speaking to both the beauty and banality of (re)presentation, as well as to the innate possibility for transformation that wigs offer (further voiced by the ribbon’s own shift into the shape of a fork end). Hard meets soft; heavy meets light; function now detained by the whimsy of ornamentation.

The title of Closer to God is a clip from a famous quote – often attributed to that great Mistress of sparkles and wigs, Dolly Parton – that the higher or bigger the hair, the closer one gets to God. One might suggest that the God Ms. Parton refers to can be read as a more abstract source of power. Of license and agency. This empowerment begins to shape itself more freely when considering the art and act of wigs in Drag culture. The transformative propensity of hair as laid out by Abdu’Allah or González Martín is, now, more determinedly unveiled by Costelloe’s installation, however, the fragility that such transformation is propelled by remains constant. Drag, born of beauty and protest, comes from a space of love but also of considerable pain. The wig – this one serving Lana del Ray realness garnished with a sprinkle of Mommie Dearest – becomes not just another hairdo but the cervelliere of a modern-day warrior.

Sarah Miska, Grey Competition Buns, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in)

V: Sarah miska

The frequency of hair, spiced, as we have so often found, with a dash of the fetish, marks the delectably painstaking paintings of Sarah Miska. One finds it in the whips, bridles and rippled silks of her horse and jockey paintings: all executed with this bewildering attention not just to detail but, it seems, to the very mechanics of attention itself. Grey Mare (2024) doesn’t just muse on equine beauty, served with a dollop of fetish. Nor does it just muse over the tradition of equine paintings - and especially equestrian sports - as signifiers of class and thus division. This is a painting that transports its viewer because of the very contest Miska provokes between seeing and believing. Seeing made easy because of the extraordinary palpability her microscopic marks fashion; believing made difficult because of the breviloquence her subject is forced to endure. Cropped; clipped and cut back, the viewer’s task at hand is to amplify where the object condenses. To pay attention to every single, atomic detail in every single hair of the horse’s mane, even when such scrutiny does not come with the usual phenomenological reward nestled in totality. Looking is not enough when you’re in front of one of Miska’s paintings: one must breathe deep, dive deeper and just go with the flow and bob between surface, substance and sense engendered by a single eyelash; a buckle of belted leather or a stray hair. We see what we see. We believe what we don’t see. Like Sarah’s horses. Like others’ gods.

Sarah Miska, Dressage Braided Bun, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in)

Like the wig, certain types of hairdos convey not just one’s status (real or fantasised) but one’s class. By having her lens falls upon the strict rules of presentation associated with competitive dressage and showjumping, Miska is – just like the immaculately groomed horses she paints – making a comment about the type of people who are wealthy enough to participate in such a sport, and the vagaries of its ‘rulebook’. Brown Braided Bun (2024) speaks to that impossibly perfect world of bejewelled hair in tight buns; immaculately symmetrical cropped jackets and horses’ tails and manes evenly arranged in litanies of impeccable knots. All that ornamentation abbreviated, yet amplified, on her canvas by squeezing her image into the pictorial space. Thus, Miska transforms the usual signification of the horse as a beast of burden: ponies, once peons, now made pendants of privilege. Her work now this molecular Columbo-like investigation into the vicissitudes of entitlement. Where Mark Wallinger’s hybrid steeds speak of breeding and Domenico Gnoli’s extravagant Still Life works transform that genre into abstracted landscapes, Sarah’s enterprise fuses both. We get all too up and way too personal with the subject of hair that appears pretty enough to be benign but, upon closer inspection, leaves you scratching a guilty itch. The devil in her details – the loose strands of single hairs that perhaps indicate the passing of a different ride - that stare you in the face are always all too easy to miss when turning a blind eye on them. Yet Miska’s clipped vision of bondage forces us to look; to see and to know, even when we don’t want to.

VI: Malcolm bradley

If Miska and Abdu’Allah’s works achieve their visual amplification through the litotes of their handle of the matter and material of hair, then Malcolm Bradley takes an even more nanoscopic approach to the description of hair, literally getting right down to the root of the matter.

Malcolm Bradley, String ghosts, 2024, Hydrographic print on XPS foam insulation, 60 x 80 cm (23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in)

String ghosts (2024) is a hydrographic print of Bradley’s own hair follicles that have regrown around a scar left by an operation on his skull. Hair, once again, signifying rebirth following trauma. Bradley’s individual hairs stand like single, etiolated trees in the sulphuric landscape of Yellowstone. Despite their prosaic description, these images are perhaps some of the most abstracted in this Scene; their objecthood seemingly at odds with Bradley’s decision to use his own hair and body as the source for his image. It is because of this scrutiny – his search for understanding in the gaps of meaning – that Bradley can elicit a vocabulary for lived experiences that lie outside the boundaries of debate or explanation. The magnification of a single hair now becomes a conquest not of what is seen or comprehended, but of what typically remains unseen and unknown. So it is that hair bounces, once again, between the natural and the supernatural; the physical and the spiritual and, in so doing, Bradley’s follicles become godly particles all their own.

VII: Patricia Piccinini

We end our journey somewhere between Heaven and Earth. In her Artist Statement of 1999, Patricia Piccinini wrote “Currently, my deep interest is in the status of ‘the natural’, which to me is a political question, grounded in lived experience. I am interested in how our understanding of the natural has shifted. I am interested in what is natural now; what might constitute the nature (as in natural habitat) of the contemporary, movie watching, in-vitro fertilised mall-rat. As such I am interested in an expanded, hybrid nature rather than the purist ‘return to Eden’ concept that is usually opposed to the artificial.” Piccinini is an artist that, like Bradley, discovers the abstract in the figure; finds the beauty in the horror; hears those celestial incantations in the prose of the everyday, transforming the ordinariness of hair – as arc, act and art – into something quizzical and sublime.

Piccinini’s body of work unfolds in the crucible of transformation. Scooters can transmogrify into bucking stags; sphincters can twinkle like stars in the night. Where Piccinini has been most often celebrated is for a series of works that depict an array of what can best be described as ‘creatures’. Made out fibreglass and silicone, nearly all the artist’s creatures have some form of covering of real human hair. Again, her concept and craft redirecting the nature of this material, alienating the reality of human hair as it covers her otherworldly figures, even as it remains faithful to its original, human function.

Patricia Piccinini, The Protege, 2023, Silicone, fibreglass, hair, 25 x 46 x 26 cm (9 7/8 x 18 1/8 x 10 1/4 in), Edition 6 of 6 + 2 APs

The Protege (2023) is a small, baby-like figure, made more infantile by the comforting grasp of its tiny blue doll. It stretches out across the floor as if about to crawl towards to you like a happy toddler. The soft rolls of its baby flesh further imbue the creature with an innocence and delight that only human babies can elicit. Yet, upon close inspection, hair begins to pop up across the creature’s body. A bright mop of it on its head is then followed by tiny tufts of amber hair that are found sprouting on parts of its body that confirm its ‘creature’ status yet still do not alienate the figure as both object and subject.

For as much as hair here leads you down a path towards dystopic abjection, Piccinini makes it abundantly clear this figure, like all of us, is different. But it, like we all should be, is focused solely on minding their own business and hoping their sunny engagement – eyes peering slightly upwards towards the light of communication – makes a lasting connection. Truth, like love, like this figure’s tufts of beautiful hair, acts in mysterious ways and yet Piccinini can distil the truth of hair and use that truth to create extraordinary inventions that, in turn, convey the power, beauty and truth of love.

Matt Carey-Williams
London and Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
1 – 11 November 2024