Description:

Published to document the 2024 exhibition that preceded it at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Hair Pieces explores the complex significance of hair in contemporary culture through a selection of recent Australian and international works of art. Edited by Melissa Keys and published by Perimeter Editions, the book encompasses a wide range of practices, including drawing, painting, performance, photography, installation, text, and more. As such, this collection of works reveals interwoven dialogues tracing identity, spirituality, agency, and resistance.
The book – which works to examine the myriad ways in which artists utilise hair to investigate and conjure generative possibilities for growth, empowerment, and transformation – was designed to play the role of an unofficial catalogue for the exhibition, and an autonomous publication in its own right.
The idea anchoring the design treatment was to play the dual role of generously documenting the exhibition, while also allowing the book to read as a contemporary design object.
The design concept plays with visual ideas of entwinement. The elongated forms of plaits and braids are articulated through the book’s tall and slim proportions, while the humble size was in keeping with Perimeter’s accessible ethos and its market positioning as an illustrated text/reader.
This concept of entwinement is imbued in the cover typography, where elongated serifs cause that the letters to merge. On the inner pages exaggerated indents and alignments across the book’s essays, create lacing typographic rhythms, intended to evoke connotations plaiting. A Coptic bind was employed, for its ‘hairy’ qualities, while the title was printed on the exposed spine.
The book’s content is diverse in its bearings, spanning painting, sculpture, installation, photography, film, and various other media, alongside installation views, extensive essays, creative and poetic written commissions, and more. The works are at once radiant and repellent, and richly symbolic, bouncing between the corporeal, personal, and political.