“Hair is autobiography,” posits the exhibition text for What Touches the Scalp is Close to the Bone. “It is often the first thing we alter when something shifts with us.” Such a take is culturally widespread, popular within media targeting female audiences (as in ‘How My Long Hair Represents My Journey to Womanhood’, Teen Vogue, 2 May 2018) as well as in more generalist publications ( ‘A moment that changed me: I shaved off my hair’, The Guardian, 4 February 2026). Whether this involves cutting, growing, reshaping, balding, greying or refusing to remove body hair, every follicle is one to reinvent at best or to fret over at worst. Solange Knowles famously sang about the way in which perceptions of hair are problematised through a racial lens and are ultrasensitive universally: “Don’t touch my hair / When it’s the feelings I wear.”
