Fine Art undergraduate Jessica Lewis collected hair from 10 of her friends and several bags from salons in Nottingham to create three installations for the 2024 art and design Graduate Festival. The 21-year-old washed the hair she had collected with shampoo and conditioner before transforming it into artwork which aims to draw extreme reactions from gallery visitors. Advertisement Advertisement Did you know with an ad-lite subscription to Hucknall Dispatch, you get 70% fewer ads while viewing the news that matters to you.
“ People found it eerie and disturbing, and I thought ‘I’d really like to push this’,” said Jessica, from Bourton in North Dorset, who is studying BA Fine Art in the Nottingham School of Art & Design. “I was living in a house of four girls and there was hair everywhere. I thought there was something so beautiful in it, but it was on the floor discarded.
“Other people saw it as disgusting clogging up their drains and hair brushes, but I saw a real beauty and wanted to use it to make art.” Jessica spent three months making the art, with up to six hours a day working on it. Advertisement Advertisement The hair collected includes curly hair, pink hair, bleached hair, natural healthy hair, red, brown, blonde and black hair.
After washing the hair she would comb it and let it dry on fabric. Other hair she would leave unwashed and in clumps. Jessica’s art also includes paper which she made from used paper towels, egg containers, egg shells, receip.
