Lost Art: human hair embroidery

San Diego State University, California, early 2001. A low-lit exhibition in one of the university galleries displays white textile objects largely covered in black fuzz. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to be human hair, finely interwoven with the cotton threads.

I attended a talk by the artist. I’ve forgotten her name and most of what she said, but the impact of someone choosing to insert individual hairs (how long were they? Who pulled them off their head?) into a needle and quietly and patiently embroidering  virginal tablecloths with them fascinated me. Even then, I already had an older, hazier memory of a museum somewhere in England’s Black Country that featured lockets and other love-tokens made in the Victorian era with hair from a platonic lover. The artist in SDSU, however, made large work that played with ideas of disgust and soiling. The white cloth had clusters of hairy patches over it, not quaint little plats and knots like the old English romantic souvenirs.