Most people think of hair as something that’s cut off or shed, but Carleton graduate Cindy Stelmackowich said she has discovered hair can also be used to hold on to loved ones forever.
The Ottawa artist said her artwork was inspired by Victorian mourning artifacts housed in the Bytown Museum. These pieces are on display in the exhibition “Dearly Departed” through Jan. 8.
“They really saw hair completely differently from the way, I think, we do now. They saw it as a token of personal identity. Nothing would be more personal than to have a lock of someone’s hair,” she said.
During her residency, Stelmackowich said she was enthralled by hair wreaths and images of Queen Victoria, who had a very big impact on how people mourned in the 19th century.
As she studied Victorian history, she said she discovered mourning rituals often involved collecting a loved one’s hair.
“Dearly Departed” consists of the Bytown’s collection of 19th century artifacts, as well as the artist’s contemporary work. Stelmackowich said she learned Victorians incorporated hair into a lot of their jewelery, such as broaches, lockets and earrings, which inspired her to create her own pieces. One of those pieces, Eye Wreath, made out of hair and wire and covered with tiny hand-painted glass eyes gazing at viewers, generates a distressing feel of presence and absence, she said.
“I thought it would be surrealist to have [the glass eyes] sort of look back,” she said.
In another piece, Stelmackowich inserted synthetic hair around a crown and installed a light inside — it was inspired by Victorian bed crowns.
During the 19th century, Victorians were very interested in textiles and had bed crowns above a head board with fabric coming down over the bed, Stelmackowich said.
Stelmackowich said she tends to focus on more than one medium— she likes to work with digital photography, sculpture and installations all at once to convey the depiction of Victorian mourning.
Curator Judith Parker said she has always followed what contemporary artists do in Ottawa. As a result, she invited Stelmackowich to do a residency, despite how unusual it is for a contemporary artist to be invited to a historical museum. Parker will be giving a curator’s talk Nov. 6.
Parker worked for nine months to create the exhibit, which has been very well received by the public, she said.
“People are fascinated by the topic,” she said of the Victorian grieving process.
Stelmackowich’s “Big Hairy Workshop” Nov. 19 will encourage people to make their own objects out of synthetic hair, she said.
She said these crafts drew from more recent inspiration in Los Angeles where people used their cat and dog hair to create objects.
Hair was the foremost trend of expressing death. However, the Victorians embraced death and acknowledged it as a part of life.
“When one went through mourning, it wasn’t just this deep grief where they were paralyzed, it was actually widely creative,” she said.
