FROM THE STREATHAM HILL THEATRE - EARLY WORK
The Suitcase came out of a conversation I had one night at a party with someone who used to work at the National Theatre, odd in retrospect when I later had my solo show Roxana Halls' Tingle-Tangle there.
I mentioned my interest in theatre and performance in my work and they told me that they used to work in the prop and costume department at the National Theatre. She told me that back in the day a member of the department would be sent overseas with an empty suitcase to be filled with hair which they would purchase on their trip to be made into wigs on their return. As I recall they said they would go to different countries for this purpose, but all of them were from areas of economic struggle.
Something about this struck me as extraordinarily poignant.
Thinking about the cutting off and selling of one's hair brought to mind Jo Marsh, who sold her hair as a heroic gesture because she was too proud to beg Aunt March for money, but also as a hugely symbolic act of emancipation. In real life, Louisa May Alcott lost her precious three and a half feet of brown hair helplessly. She caught typhoid pneumonia while nursing solders during the Civil War, and while she was delirious doctors ordered her hair cut off.
This story of the loss and acquisition of hair made me think of women's sacrifice, how many women are so economically imperiled that they have to sell something so central to their presentation of femininity.
Some women in the west will give their hair as a gesture of kindness for wigs for cancer sufferers, but in more patriarchal cultures, the loss of hair has entirely different connotations.
Visually the image of hair in suitcase was very arresting, it made me think of women being transported through sex trafficking, economic migrants and refugees.
I decided to deliberately have one bundle of hair grey, because these problems persist throughout women's lives. The red ribbon can be read as viscera, blood...blood lines, a trail of breadcrumbs by which a seeker of these women might find them.