In many cultural and ceremonial lineages, the cutting of hair marks rupture — a gesture of release, mourning, or individuation. But hair is not only what we shed. It is also what we carry: a living archive of social projection, identity formation, and bodily inscription.

Hair Whips is a sculptural series composed of my own hair, collected and bound over two decades. What began as a personal ritual has become an index of survival — an evolving portrait of inherited narratives, aesthetic legibility, and refusal.

In my case, blonde hair has carried specific assumptions — of desirability, naivety, availability, and affluence. But these projections are not unique. They are one expression within a much wider structure: the way bodies are read and assigned meaning before they speak.

This work is informed by that architecture — where gender, race, class, and physical form determine cultural readability and social consequence. Hair Whips reclaims what has long been aestheticized and reconstitutes it as artifact, instrument, and indictment.

Though rooted in my own body, this work speaks to a broader condition:
the misrecognition of form as fact.
The imposition of biography onto appearance.
The quiet violence of being assumed.

Hair Whips does not resolve that tension. It animates it.

These are not adornments.
They are ritual implements.
They mark the act of choosing what to keep, what to sever, and what must be reformed into a tool of return.