Jenny Owens

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Drawings with Hair connects death with hair and was conceived as a type of souvenir of someone`s life. Hair is also a trace since it is one of the few elements which remain of us when we die. When I was a child my grandmother showed me a box containing a lock of hair belonging to her mother. Although I never looked inside it, the image of hair being kept inside a box stayed with me from that moment on.

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The symbols drawn are ones which have become recurring in my work, some of which have a universal quality like the sea or a house. This work came after a performance in the opening of an exhibition in which I cut off my hair and made symbols on the the wall with nails. These symbols were inspired by a trip to Newgrange, a place in Ireland where a large stone construction was built over 5000 years ago in such a way that between the 19th and the 23rd of December every year, light entered inside the construction and shone on the ashes of the dead who had been placed to rest on enormous stones. Outside the construction are stones with symbols engraved on them, the meanings of which are still unknown. These unknown traces fascinated me. The fact that we do not know what they mean only makes them even more intriguing.