Material remembers where the archive does not.

Using human hair as both site and residue, Donna Lowson’s work holds bodies in tension, where containment and release remain in flux.

Through acts of binding, sorting, counting, and undoing, the sculptures and vitrines attend to systems that shape, regulate, and classify the body. Hair operates as an active material, volatile, resistant, and responsive, exceeding the structures imposed upon it even as it is ordered, looped, and contained.

Her work draws on historical lineages of Victorian hairwork, not as reproduction, but as a site of methodological friction where making becomes a form of listening. Repetition, failure, and reversal generate meaning through process rather than representation.

Across numbered works and vitrines of plaited and ordered hair, the installation considers how materials carry what institutional or written archives cannot hold: embodied histories, fragmented intimacies, and residues of care, coercion, and violence.

Absence is treated not as a loss, but as an active condition of the work.

What is held, and what escapes, remains unsettled.