These were the final embroideries I made with hair. Featuring Sue Upritchard’s grey locks, and my own black hair. To read more about this body of work, scroll down or navigate to the page Mythical Creatures. Or refer to the artist’s book & catalogue, 9, published in 2008. There’s probably a few things floating around the internet about this body of work too.
August 2010
Works completed between 2006-2010.
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In these works human hair, external to the human body, is used to draw the interior of the body. Some of the images are based on 17th-18th century anatomical engravings.
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Exhibited at Martin Browne Fine Art, January 2010.
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Selection of works from 2007-2009..
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64zero3, Christchurch, July 2008
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These scans were taken prior to framing and feature in the accompanying catalogue.
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Link to the catalogue for this exhibition.
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Some embroideries with hair made from 2005-2008.
I began this body of work looking at Chinese motifs extracted from textiles. To the left is the image of a dragon embellishing the coat of a Qing Dynasty court garment, and to the right, a butterfly, renown in the ancient Chinese philosophy story where a man, having dreamed of a butterfly, wakes up to wonder if he is a butterfly dreaming the dream of a man.
The use of hair in these tiny embroideries with my own hair references Victorian mourning jewelry, as well as an ancient Chinese practice of women embroidering images of the Buddha with their own hair as a form of piety.
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‘The Gravy’ clip 7 mins – 2008, shot and edited by Simon Raby.
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These works sit in a narrative, that of a day in the life of a young woman. I have taken text out of “graphic designed” items such as commercial packaging, signage etc. and replaced it with text from Untitled (2001) and changed the visual elements of these items to suit the text.
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Based on existing forms and formats of graphic designed ephemera, a New Zealand bookstore (Whitcoulls) sign is transformed into the words “Falling into Fiction” and a Penguin Classics book is altered to mirror the questions the protagonist has. A museum poster, using the background of a piece corrugated cardboard, purports to show the increasingly jaded protagonist “Treasures of the Unknown and Uncharted”. A page from a computer manual helpfully delineates “methods” of making paintings.
And finally, in a form of mirroring (such as the play within a play or a story within a story), the person goes to the theatre, only to find “herself” as the character. Her companion never shows up.
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Click here to visit the project website.
Concrete poetry or psychology textbook and thesaurus mash-up, this book was based on collected scraps of notes and first published in 2000 as part of a final submission. The texts in the figures in A Humid Day were taken from this book.
To download a copy of the recently digitised edition of the book, please follow this link.
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