In the search for contemporary black female identity the concern with being physically and sexually attractive is a useful site at which to examine the emergence of femininity and the numerous possibilities it opens up for the re-articulation of new identities through the practices of artifice. In a time where images of race and representation have become a contemporary obsession, hair, seemingly the most superficial part of the human body remains an object of intense elaboration and preoccupation in many societies. Hair is a multivalent, deeply symbolic material that is employable as a metaphor for broader societal issues. The physical and material inclusion of hair in art is a contemporary phenomenon and tests the boundaries of traditional art.
My work tries to questions the construction of ‘beauty’ as articulated through the politics of the body as structured by the hierarchal values of colonial racism that have left a deep mark on current conceptions of what is considered attractive and beautiful by looking at the racial, sexual, class, political, and geographic cultures and locations mediate the technologies of artifice and alteration required for the achievement of “beauty”.
Through my work I endeavor to forcefully re-conceive the ideological codes and social values that framed black hair and bodies with an affliction of negative connotations and liberate the materiality of my hair from the burdens bequeathed by racist ideology and call to question the imagined understanding of my own body and “othered” bodies in the normative Eurocentric imaginary.
The physical inclusion of hair in art and especially in painting is in no way something new, but conceptually using the hair as the colourist tool from which the image is made takes its inclusion one step further. My work, which ever form it takes, raises many associations and it is open to all interpretation within reasonable limit. For example the circular mounted canvas with its symbolic employment of the colour red as background draws implicit references to the Zulu “Isicholo” in color and reduced shape, this link can be inferred in the work amongst many others.