SHEARED HAIR, SHAVED HEAD.
I am a sculpture artist based on Wadawurrung Country with a background in textile art. My practice interprets a language that bears trace of family linage listening to the materials as a generative process. Sheared Head, Shaved Head is a series of generative sculptural works that reclaim a story of erasure within Australian colonial history and responds to the concealment of convict ancestors within my family tree. This sculptural representation is informed through the cutting of hair and the shaving of hair to trace an encounter of the forced practice upon migrant female convicts in Tasmania. Retelling of the practice of hair cutting and head shaving explores this act of repression and subjugation to traverse through time and connect to my five times great grandmother Jane Whiteside.
