21/01/20
My idea for the third experiment came to me while cleaning up from my second one.
While winding up my yarn, my shedding hair accidentally got caught in it.
I also accidentally caught a bit of yarn on the electric light beam. It reminds me of hair. I will think about what this means.
22/01/20
I combed my hair on a table.
I then cut thread and shaped it into the shape of my fallen hair, to see what messages it would make.
To me, it looks like handwriting I can’t decipher, an embryo, and a love heart.
The yarn would not conform to the shape of my hair. It resisted leaving a human imprint.
Fallen hair tends to evoke disgust. I feel like with each experiment, I’m going to make the audience more uncomfortable. While the medium and the basic concept remains the same, each one touches on different aspects of tendency, tension, and tenderness – the implications of inhabiting a physical body.
The meaning of this one is the same as all my other experiments: witnessing my presence even if my body is not physically there. You can estimate how long my hair is and what my hair texture is from the thread.
But unlike a line or a circle, there’s no clear shape from my fallen hair. It resembles writing and this recalls the difficulties of translation and communication in the human experience. The yarn does not have the tendency of my hair to kink and curl. So no matter what I see in it is not what others will see, as much as I try to get it across, because I cannot control how my hair flows.