Artist Statement from my Showerfriends exhibit at Jailbreak Studios - February  2020

In 2017, my hair grew long enough to become a nuisance to the shower drain so I began placing my tangled, shampoo-slick hair against the beige plastic of my shower wall. I began finding faces on the wall in the tangled strands as I peeled them from my hands and swirled them around with my fingertips. I’d find a nose here or an ear there to capture the portraits in my head, much like I would scratching out and discovering a being in my sketchbook. Since then I’ve documented over one hundred of these intuitive drawings from this mundane hygienic practice.

Initially, I was attached to the Showerfriends existing as temporary images, only made tangible by documentation and in print form. However this year I was encouraged and inspired to find a way to let the hair escape the confines of my bathroom, pressed between glass. I began saving the hair from the shower wall and reusing it to make Showerfriends on glass with these tangled scraps along with trimmings from my home haircuts.

My process involves hair and water still, asking these emergent figures to show me who they are. This medium forces me to forget preciousness––the interconnected strands refuse to let me marry myself to the eye shape I have drawn while I scoot the cheekbone or alter the chin. At the same time, since nothing is permanentl, it’s a very forgiving medium; erasing simply means moving or removing the hair from the glass. Vacillating between permanence and none at all, I get to listen to the hair and water and allow for the natural pleasing curves they offer.

I can’t ignore the word grotesque in relation to most of my artistic focus. It’s definition is embedded in art historical narrative: ugly human and animal forms swirling with foliage, hidden in secret chambers in Italy created during the Renaissance, as well as the drawn studies by the drawing masters. The definition of grotesque is “conceived, made or carried out without adherence to truth or reality.” My kid-brain was coated in slime and toilets by nineties cartoons like Ren + Stimpy––I was specifically entranced by the disgusting and surreal close-ups of rotting toenails, bloodshot eyes and shiny red infected gums. I have always been in love with the grotesque. I mean, isn’t that a part of existing in a body? I am tickled and curious about the overlap of a greater human impulse to caricaturize and exaggerate the nastiness of bodies. Is it cultural influence or nature that makes us simultaneously revel in and repel against our own disgusting little selves?