I began losing my hair in 2020.
For most of my life, my hair felt inseparable from my identity. I dyed it different colours, cut it apart, grew it long again. It was something I could control, reshape, perform through. A canvas I could continually return to.
Losing it felt different than I expected. More intimate. More exposing. There are few places to hide when your reflection begins to change in ways you did not choose.
This piece sits somewhere between grief and acceptance.
The torn edges of the figure reference fragmentation, but the gold embellishments borrow from the philosophy of kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken objects with gold. Instead of hiding cracks or damage, kintsugi highlights them as part of the object’s history and beauty. I wanted the baldness, the altered shape of the self, to be held with the same care. Not corrected. (Not hidden.) Witnessed.
The title, (sic), is a term used in writing and historical texts. It is placed after a word or phrase to show that something unusual, incorrect, or misspelled has been intentionally left exactly as it originally appeared. In this piece, the title asks who gets to decide what counts as an error in the first place. It speaks to the experience of feeling visibly altered while resisting the pressure to edit oneself into acceptability.
The stars in the background act as both comfort and confrontation. They remind me that my pain is real, while also asking me to place it within a much larger universe. (Also, who doesn’t love the relief one gets when we look up at the stars and realize all our problems are insignificant?) The barbed wire remains unresolved. Protection and imprisonment often resemble one another.
This work does not fully resolve the experience of loss or self-image. Instead, it asks what it means to remain visible while changing shape.
If you’d like to hear more about the details of the show, check out Linnea and John’s podcast This is Not Art Therapy (The Podcast) for more banter. In Episode 47: Linnea-sode (Slow Bloom) {Art Show/ Fundraiser}, they discuss the show in greater detail.
June 10th Update
According to my website analytics, this is the most viewed piece, by a land slide. Curious as to what folks are draw to in this image?