What Touches the Scalp is Close to the Bone begins with proximity. The scalp is not just another part of the body - it is the skin stretched directly over the architecture of the self. Beneath it: the skull, the mind, memory, consciousness. To approach the scalp is to come close to the most interior part of (inner-most fragile part)? someone without ever piercing the skin. This exhibition takes that nearness as its point of departure.
Hair becomes a threshold - between interior and exterior, between identity and presentation, between tenderness and power. It occupies a liminal space where the deeply internal becomes publicly visible. It is softness emerging from structure, surface anchored to bone. (using the body as an act of defiance)
Hair is autobiography. It is often the first thing we alter when something within us shifts. We cut it to sever memory. We dye it to mark transformation. We grow it long, shave it away, conceal it, reveal it, adorn it. It can be politicized, eroticized, sanctified. Though technically dead matter, it carries the trace of lived experience.
But hair is also relational. To touch someone’s scalp - to brush hair from their face, to braid it, oil it, to lie beside them and move your fingers slowly through it - is an act of intimacy, of connection. These gestures of care are quiet invitations into vulnerability. Through touch, we reach closer to the other, closer to their bone, closer to their insides. (closer to a part of us that we keep veiled/ untethered)
What Touches the Scalp is Close to the Bone suggests that hair is not simply (at the) surface. It is a metaphorical site, where identity is rehearsed and performed, intimacy is offered and received, culture is carried and inherited, vulnerability is exposed and held.
To engage with hair - in solitude or through touch - is to approach the structure of a person without breaking the skin. (From this, we present a love letter of how ritual, traditions and memory can dissipate into vessels of conversation/ present itself as an act of self- reclamation.)
TAKE THIS ALL WITH A PINCH OF SALT BABES!!!
