Ana Mendes: Black Cloth

6 Sep-14 Sep 2023

Overview

Black Cloth is an exhibition in which visual artist Ana Mendes explores the hair market; a poetic threading together of all that it entails, from labour and marketing to feminism and language. For this installation, the artist visited hair stores around the world, photographed the terminology used in the sale of wigs and hair (such as “charming”, “sexy”, “sassy”) and embroidered the associated vocabulary, using hair extracted from the wigs, by hand, on black cloth. Black Cloth draws inspiration from Deptford, one of the oldest Afro-Caribbean communities, in London, where the artist used to live.