21 MEMENTO MORI

This is my grandmother’s hair. It is 21 metres long and weighs 9525 grams. It is made from 63 calico tubes, I metre long, 11cm wide, stuffed with 9 kg of wool and hand sewn together to make 3 strands of hair each one 21 metres long.I can only ever remember my grandmother with short permed hair, dyed black and then silver with a blue or lilac rinse as she got older. Janine Miller says in ‘Hair Without a Head: Disembodiment and the Uncanny’, disembodied hair is liminal, existing somewhere between the body and the other, life and death.

Objects can be vessels for ideas and feelings, including memories. To historian Christine Holm (2004) objects and specifically jewellery can act as both a way of ‘showing and hiding’ and ‘mourning jewels …… are exhibited secrets.’ Each Memento Mori object holds a token that is significant to me. The first teeth my children lost, a lock of their hair, my father’s signet ring, my mother’s netball pin, 21 memories about my father, my grandmother’s hair. I have taken my precious secrets and encased them in 21 grams of needle felted merino wool, dipped them in wax 21 times, crocheted and beaded them. I will conceal, protect, hide them away. They will be present yet absent.