Monday, October 12, 2009
Hair’em Scare’em: An Unlikely Inspiration
Hair’em Scare’em is a book edited by R. Klanten, M. Huebner, and S. Ehmann. The book explores an unusual “medium”: hair.
It is easy to overlook the effect hair in art and design can have. Hair is, after all, everywhere. Because it is not an object of scarcity, we assume that it is and always will be a mundane aspect of everyday life. Hair’em Scare’em, however, challenges this idea.
Artists (or clever, thinking, and innovative ones at least) featured in this book find inspiration in the material of hair. Hair is explored as more than simple dead cells sprouting out from one’s head. It is manipulated to communicate a surprisingly larger array of emotions. Long and flowing hair can invoke ethereal beauty. Rough and jagged hair can be frighteningly threatening. Hair, as the artists of Hair’em Scare’em so clearly depict, is a unique medium in the fact that it treads the fine line between life and death. Hair can be both really. Attached to a well cared for head hair seems to imply life. Severed and hair seems to imply an unnerving death. Nearly all the works featured in the book are dictated by these inherent properties of hair. The designer is only bringing to fruition the potential the material always possessed.
Who knew there was so much to hair in the first place?
Inspiration is found where observation begins. Designers and artists must notice even the ordinary and mundane to create the extraordinary and new.
8:11 PM by jamie.