Everyday Things & Details

Everyday Things and Details came from a lot of feeling cold and tired and stiff, a general pervasive repulsion presenting itself in apathy and dread. I was listening to loads of self help podcasts at the time, all touting this notion of finding happiness in the small things, finding purpose in the circular motion with which you wash your dishes, the mundane being sacred and all that jazz. Now, I don't necessarily disagree with these ideas, I think there can be beauty in the small things, but more times I find within them a deep disgust. Hair came to represent that for me.

Paul Rozin says disgust operates as foreshadowing for our own death, every encounter with moldy meat reminding us that we too will one day become moldy meat. I find detached hair to elicit a similar reaction. Existing between the body and the world, what can be a symbol for youth and beauty immediately becomes repulsive and polluting once no longer part of the body, a shadow of ourselves alienated in decay. And though the hair doesn't contain any real peril, in the same way that the daily tasks I juxtapose it with don't, as an unconscious reminder of our own mortality, it becomes gut churning. I wanted the hair to litter and infest images of a morning routine, captioned with emails, to do lists, messages, excerpts from my notes app and various conversations, all containing tastes of a similar dread within them.