Gray Hairs
By Terhi Marttila
Please experience this piece in fullscreen at this link.
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Gray Hairs is an interactive poem for the browser (desktop and mobile devices) about ageing and the gendered practice of dyeing one’s hair. Black circles (hairs) on screen slowly fade to invisibility. Clicking a graying hair displays a fragment of the poem, which we also hear spoken in the artist’s voice. The clicking turns the hairs back to black, like plucking or dyeing gray hairs, countering the process of becoming invisible. The observations about gray hairs and ageing are made up of plural perspectives which the artist collected in conversations with people, yet the poem is written in a first person, confessional form. Plural perspectives thus converge unto the single “I” to orbit some of the manifold dimensions of aging and graying.
