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Out Of My Hair

Catharyne Ward's Unscaleable Tresses


Title: HerWorld
Artist: Catharyne Ward
Gallery: Artesian, Edinburgh
Medium: Giclee Print
Price: £600

London punk rocker Catharyne Ward has collected and bagged her own hair trimmings since she was 14. In between listening to Sex Pistols records and gobbing on old ladies, she’d enthusiastically cut, scythe and dye her friends’ hair on Saturday mornings for beer money before heading down to the pub to get messy with a bunch of dudes wearing mohawks and bondage pants.

She told us: “My own off-cuts of hair have been lovingly stashed and sealed in glass vessels reminiscent of reliquaries. HerWorld, my ongoing project, is a series of etchings rendered on scratchboard that expand upon the dark and erotic world of the Brothers Grimm and, specifically, the story of Rapunzel. These abstracted ‘hairscapes’ reveal a strange fetishised feminine world with deep psychological roots drawn from my own experiences. Flowing hills cascade in streams of golden locks which run curling into silken valleys locked within sheer unscaleable tresses. HerWorld is my world, a land engulfed in a tidal wave of coiffured and braided hair.”

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