Central Saint Martins Curatorial Studies students put together this exhibition on hair. The aim was to show a range of artists and how the individuals and the public feel about their own hair. The work for the show was shown all around Vauxhall. Some were in the local cinema, some in the local laundrette, some down the road, some drawn on doors and some at the venue for the performances.
The work was varied and interesting. There were paintings, drawings, film, performance, spoken word, graffiti and interactive art. The show opened with a Q&A with the CSM students. They discussed why they chose hair as a topic, how they found and chose the artists, how they made sure they covered multiple perspectives on hair and how they found and decided on the venues for the work. After the Q&A, there was a performance, a reading of the poetry the artist had written. This discussed topics such as love, lost love, death, loneliness and depression, all done with a quirky upbeat humorous tone. After the large round of applause, a film was played. The piece was a performance originally, with the artist moving within a limited space, getting into a position, staying there for 30 seconds while reciting their written work, moving into a new position, and pausing again and so on. After the video, the audience were told to visit the work seen on the way in upstairs (artwork was lining the walls), to visit the toilets downstairs to see more work and leave a message, and to also walk round the room to write or draw our own ideas and feelings towards hair on charts and drawn bald heads on paper. At first the audience were reserved but, by the end of the evening, all the paper was full of words, tallies, scribbles and doodles.
The interactive artwork was some of my favourite, as the paper simply had very open questions written on them and people would write anything that came to them when answering. Seeing all the different hair preferences and everyone's different experience with hair was very interesting. The lists were endless: some people had shaved their head, some people shaved their eyebrows, some people plaited their armpit hair, some people dyed their pubes, some people covered their hair, some people never cut their hair. There were so many different experiences that I had never even thought of until the individuals, (the public/the audience) had written it. I wrote that my hair has been earned and that it took me along time to get it.
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