Women Framing Hair
Heather Hanna, "Women Framing Hair"
English | ISBN: 1443876070 | 2015 | 245 pages | PDF | 6 MB
English | ISBN: 1443876070 | 2015 | 245 pages | PDF | 6 MB
This book explores the complex and enigmatic motif of hair in the work of five contemporary women artists, Chrystl Rijkeboer, Alice Maher, Annegret Soltau, Kathy Prendergast and Ellen Gallagher, from the late 1970s to the present. It investigates why hair is such a productive and resonant site of meaning, how it is suggestive of, and responds to, serial strategies, and why it appears to be of particular significance to women who are artists. It explores the implications of hair as an embodied material, its role as a haptic metaphor of the life cycle, and what might be seen as a darker, more liminal side of hair as a site of excess and body waste, and its ability to represent trauma and wounding. It also discusses some of the divergent histories of hair as a rich marker of identity in cultural discourses of beauty, myth and femininity, and as a symbol of status and power. Informed by a range of theoretical approaches, this book draws on Julia Kristevas theorizations of the abject, Hélène Cixouss notion of écriture feminine, and a Deleuzian consideration of difference.
Read more