Groom

Groom
1997

Media: wood, rubber human hair, 

Size: 220 x 170 x 50mm, 

Exhibited:

2008 – Locations (one-person exhibition), OVADA, Oxford. 

1999 – Taking Stock (one-person exhibition), Keele University Art Gallery. 

1997 – “…from the institution." (one-person exhibition), Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery.

About this work:

Groom (1997) is one of my smallest works. It is a found object made functionally useless by a single intervention. The object is a hairbrush, from which I removed all the bristles, painstaking replacing each with a small tress of my own hair until the brush is in possession of a ‘full head of hair’. As a result of my intervention, the completed hybrid object mixes in equal measure the utilitarian with the relic. Groom is the first instance in which I used any form of personal, residual material (in this case from my own body) to make work, and as such is a precursor to my Three Stages of Labour (2007) and more recent from 2019 made for Within and Between: Women, Bodies, Generations. Groom can be read as a surreal object, evoking the fetish of Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936) a fur covered teacup, saucer and spoon. It also suggests the altered states of consciousness when dreams and realities cannot easily be distinguished, something prompted by the incongruous amalgamation of hard and soft materials. The domestic intimacy of Groom was designed to call to mind vanitas painting but more overtly conforms materially to the conventions of the memento mori and mourning objects such as jewellery and amulets made popular in the 19th century incorporating the hair of a deceased or separated loved one.