Mona Hatoum

"Keffieh," by Mona Hatoum, (1993-99), human hair on cotton, 1993-1999, collection Peter Norton, Santa Monica

Mona Hatoum uses Human hair as well as images and footage of her own body in her work. In the above piece she has interwoven pieces of women's hair into a traditional Arab head scarf worn only by males. Issues of gender and suppression surround this piece. There is something beautiful and at the same time grotesque about wearing the hair of another human as decoration and I find this ibject quite unsettling and repulsive. The use of hair makes the work quite intimate and is a familiar thing as we all have it although it shifts to being uncomfortable when taken out of context and removed from our bodies.

"The macho style is an externalized response to the powers of domination; but it is also a form of domination turned inward, within the community poised against the presence of women, whose voices are either repressed, or sublimated in the cause of struggle. Hatoum's feminized headscarf reveals this disavowal of the place of women and re-inserts their point of view through the embroidered strands of hair that hang loose beyond the boundary, breaking the pictorial grid of the material in the process of redefining the symbolic surface of political struggle." source

A series of etchings called 'Hair, there and everywhere' are collections of hair which look as though some have been arranged into patterns and others just laid there. You can make out images yourself and imagine what creatres could be hiding amongst the interweaving curling lines but you can't quite tell if she had intentionally made images amongst the hair.This work is very intense and involves a lot of human hair, I would love to know who it belonged to and how she obtained it because this has a lot of implications. I likt to think that it is her own, that in a way she suffered for her art and what she believes in, putting a part of herself into the work. This seems to have been the case with previous works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994) or ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journies through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body. This work also used leather and beeswax, materials from animals in conjunction with human derived material. The leather is durable, the human hair seems fragile, not holding the suitcases together, awkwardly fumbling across the gap.This work 'Van Gogh's Back' (1995) is very light hearted and fun. It reminds me of playing in the bath with shampoo in my hair and making fun shapes. I love her different uses of hair and the Human body, all of them have vastly different effects on me wether that be repulsion, fascination or just very thought provoking.

DAY I

First day at Elam.
New school, new people, new lecturers, new cafe that burns my soy milk. Coolies.
Project one requires that we create two works of art by next monday to present in our space (if you can call thirteen people in a room space). A smaller space brings about a new set of confinements and implications to work with so can be quite exciting. Lots of room for interaction within the room, high ceilings, grey floors that are almost the right colour to project on to. I think i will use this short project as a social experiment to get an idea of people's feelings and reactions towards the materials I plan to experiment with.
I want to explore skin, people's skin, animal skin, leather, fur, shedding skin and hair-waste, reactions to all of these materials and how they are revered/ repulsive. I am interested in how we use leather so carelessly without really a thought to where it has come from, yet we are so precious when it comes to our own skin, not wanting to burn or scar it, wanting perfection.
Tattoos and scarification do not fit the beauty norm as plastic sugery does even though sugery is far more extreme, body mods such as piercings and large tattoos are considered more extreme. WELL theyre not.
I want to use materials from humans, and my first thought was to use some of my hair. Combing my fingers through my hair a lot of it falls out. It's gross unless it's still attached to your scalp, nobody likes stray hairs! It reminds me a lot of Mona Hatoum's works, she uses both internal and external elements involving human hair and images and recordings of her internal organs.