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Crafts CouncilStories

Meet the makers using hair as a raw material


ByCrafts magazine

10 May 2022

Ruth Terry wins an American Society of Journalists and Authors award for her Crafts magazine feature exploring how hair connects us all


Crafts magazine

10 May 2022

  • Crafts magazine
  • Craft and wellbeing
  • Textiles

  • Hair sculpture by Joanne Petit-Frère from Redressing the Crown series, 2020. Photo: Delphine Diallo

In Crafts magazine's The Mind and Body Issue, we considered that age-old question: what does it mean to be human? Inside, we met the craftspeople challenging perceptions of both our physical, mental and emotional lives – all the way from bespoke prosthetics, to hand-crafted sex toys.

In a standout feature titled 'Threads of life', Ruth Terry highlighted makers who are using hair to create poignant – and often very personal – artworks. The story has since won an American Society of Journalists and Authors Award in the Lifestyle category.

The judging panel said: 'This article is an intriguing exploration of a unique topic – the crossroads of craft, fine art, and the use of human and synthetic hair. Ruth Terry juxtaposed the art of "hair crafting" to societal issues such as racism, sexism, and class in this well-written, thoroughly researched, and engaging piece.'

To celebrate, we've published an extract of the article below. To read the full story as it first appeared in Crafts, flick to page 46 in our digital archive – it's free for all to read until 12 June.


The Hair Craft Project by Sonya Clark, 2015, highlighting the technical skills of African diaspora hairdressers. Photo: Meg Arsenovic

Hair embodies human vulnerability and mortality. It can go white from traumatic shock. It falls out inexplicably, potentially a harbinger of sickness or death. The Victorians fashioned mourning jewellery from the hair of their dearly departed. Angela Su’s embroideries revive the craft of Imperial-era Chinese women, who stitched images of Buddha with their own tresses, acts of piety that used hair to connect to a spiritual world beyond. Centuries later, hair has become associated with modern atrocities in Nazi factories and serial killers’ trophies, amplifying what we already find repugnant about detached hair.


  • Split Stitch by Angela Su, embroidered hair on fabric, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery

  • Exchange 3 by Alix Bizet, felted human hair, 2017

This is something Angela Su leans into. ‘I would say getting the “ick” response is a compliment,’ says Su. ‘Perhaps when hair leaves the body it signifies sickness, old age or even violence. I think these all [pose] interesting questions.’ While many people would baulk at wearing a garment made of hair or putting a work of art made from it on their walls, few seem bothered when it comes in the form of wigs and extensions, if the $6 billion global hair industry is any indication.

Hair is also used in industrial applications, including cosmetic brushes, sutures, fertiliser, oil spill remediation, and even as a source of amino acids in food and pharmaceuticals. Via the global supply chain, we are all truly connected by hair. It is also used to make sustainable composite building materials because of its tensile strength – one option to reduce the environmental fallout from the bio-degradation of waste hair in drainage systems and landfills.

‘I think it’s good to talk about sustainability and finding solutions [for] using human hair,’ says Alix Bizet. But in addition to knowing the source of waste hair and considering the ‘ethical aspects of using other people’s DNA’, Bizet says, ‘there is this question of biopolitics: when you stop controlling your waste and then it’s been taken, and then it turns into gold, where do the profits go and which community gets what out of it?’


  • I Exist as Cocoa Butter and Mangos by Farrah Riley Gray, hand-woven hair, 2019

  • Mom’s Wisdom by Sonya Clark, made from the artist’s mother’s hair, 2011

By using synthetic strands, artists can circumvent the moral quandaries of using another person’s hair and ethically sourcing it, if not alleviating environmental concerns. New York artist Joanne Petit-Frère uses synthetic hair to weave elaborate masked headdresses that tower over the wearer’s head while hiding their face. In London-based Farrah Riley Gray’s hands, synthetic hair becomes meta-embroideries depicting people doing hair or abstract weavings with a felt-like nap, such as I Exist as Cocoa Butter and Mangos, a 2019 work that features in the Crafts Council Gallery’s Maker’s Eye exhibition. Riley Gray is also contributing to Hair, Untold Stories, opening at London’s Horniman Museum, which will tell tales about hair, including those from south London salons, and global hair trade networks.

Hair is an ancestral strand. It connects us to everybody


Sonya Clark

Sonya Clark does occasionally buy human hair, but she crafted some of her most arresting pieces in fibre from her own head – and her mother’s. ‘In the last 10 years of my mother’s life, she saved her hair for me,’ she says. From this, Clark painstakingly gleaned the silvery white strands for her 2011 piece Mom’s Wisdom or Cotton Candy, a lofty sphere of hair held in the artist’s hands. Through this process, Clark is connecting to an ancient lineage that spans continents and millennia: ‘When I use hair, I think: Here is this strand from my body that is not only unique to me but also a repository of all the people who have come before me because it contains my DNA.’


Read the full article on our digital archive

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