LANGHÅRET STRUKTUR (2025)
LANGHÅRET STRUKTUR is a diary project: Over the course of a year, I have collected my own naturally shed hair and processed it into a series of hair objects that have subsequently been mounted on paper. The project was created for the art magazine ARK, but was exhibited together in smallspace at KH7 in November 2025 prior to the broadcast to ARK's subscribers (see arkmappen.dk)
The project started years ago as a sudden impulse to color-sort my own hair waste, that is, as a kind of scientific curiosity in relation to my own, by now rather gray hair. I was surprised that the gray effect turned out to be due to the presence of completely white hairs, which mix with the originally brown ones. I have made several projects with my own hair in recent years (see MeTHOS and TEARS), and even after a long time working with the white hairs, they seem strangely alien to me when they are piled up - like something from another being.
Separating my own hair into light and dark is not only an analytical “scientific” approach, but also one with a strong visual and symbolic character. As a further reinforcement of the artistic dimension of the project, I have processed the day’s hair waste and made a light and a dark hair object according to the same recipe: The hairs are tied one hair at a time with a sling stitch around two “trend hairs”, the longest hairs in the middle and the shortest on the sides. The shape reflects the process of creation. The objects appear, despite being made according to the same recipe, very different due to the variation in the amount of hair and the structure of the individual hairs. Due to tensions in the hair and knots, the row of knots curves all by itself, so that the objects take on a certain resemblance to eyelashes.
Hair is something that everyone has an everyday intimate knowledge of, but perhaps not a particularly deep knowledge, cf. my own surprise at the nature of my gray hair. But hair is a material that is full of stories. I myself have “nerded out” about hair in various ways along the way: I have studied the biology of hair, I have been fascinated by 19th-century hair jewelry, including mourning jewelry made from the hair of the deceased, and I have discovered that there is a living hair waste industry in South and Southeast Asia, where hair waste is sorted manually before the hair is resold to the wig industry.
LANGHÅRET STRUKTUR has structured my working life in a tyrannical way for a year and has, on a general level, led to reflections on what kind of more or less long-haired structures generally govern us in our lives (NB! in Danish "to be long-haired" means to be off/weird or too much).
