COPPER WILD ©️
Copper Wild©
This piece belongs to the same period of experimentation as Bleach Graffiti© — 2014 to 2015, a stretch of time spent thinking about hair less as hair and more as a material, a surface, something that could carry a pattern the way fabric does. Copper Wild© is a burnt copper animal print, coloured onto a bob.
What I will say is what it revealed. Look closely and you'll notice the pattern isn't fluid — it doesn't flow the way a printed animal print flows on fabric. And that's the honest, interesting outcome of pieces like this: circular patterns don't want to stay circular in hair. I've stencilled circles onto hair before, and by the time it's been washed, dried and styled back into shape, they've come out more square than round. There's a clear pattern there — you can't get away from that — but it squares off. Squaring the circle, which is supposed to be impossible, turns out to be exactly what hair does to you whether you ask it to or not.
So here's the real question, the one I'd put to anyone looking at this piece: how would you get a pattern like this to hold up in natural, everyday fall — a one-length bob, centre parting, fringe, washed and worn like anyone actually lives — rather than only in one carefully arranged position? I haven't tried it myself. This piece was never meant to answer that question, only to raise it — it was a visual, made to make you look twice and wonder, rather than any attempt at a wearable, everyday result.
By the time I made this, I was years out of a salon environment, working entirely on my own terms, free to try things with no real reason beyond wanting to see if I could. That's really all the drive behind it — no bigger philosophy, just curiosity, and the pleasure of showing something different and leaving the rest to whoever's looking at it. What would you do differently? Could you make it hold its pattern in natural fall where I haven't yet tried?
I'd actually like to go back to that whole run of 2014–2015 textile experiments — Copper Wild© included — and try them again on a one-length human hair wig. Not to prove anything, and not because they didn't work the first time, but because they were playful experiments to begin with, and I'd like to see how far the technique could be pushed now.
What I do like is that, now, software lets me carry the pattern further than I ever could at the time — onto a dress, a necklace, a whole styled world around the hair, rather than just the hair on its own. I can even change the model entirely from myself into a professional model which gives the look an entirely new edge.
