Karin Jones

Is hair a body part or is it adornment?

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Karin Jones, who explores hair as a medium in her work, has long wondered if hair is a body part or an adornment. 

Her first survey exhibition, Ornament and Instrument, on view at the Burnaby Art Gallery in Metro Vancouver until April 16, includes her work with hair, as well pieces from her earlier two-decade career as a goldsmith and artisan. Curator Jennifer Cane brings together works from the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., as well as Jones’ private collection, allowing a sincere exploration of race, beauty and the body. 

Jones, who splits her time between Vancouver and Montreal, makes work that is largely sculptural in format and reflects her training as a metalsmith. In Precious, a set of works from 2010, fine silver and 25-karat gold damascene inlays embellish reclaimed farm tools – a shovel, a scythe, a hoe and a pitchfork – and the lids of mason jars. Beautiful, knotted patterns and botanicals snake over black oxidized steel. Damascene, a technique with roots in Japan, is used for decorating knives and firearms. It juxtaposes the hard and the soft, or ornament and instrument. 

The decorated tools are installed alongside Worn, a 2014 sculpture of a black mourning dress made almost entirely of braided hair extensions. Shown together, the installation references the transatlantic slave trade and histories of indentured agricultural work. The dress offers a sense of who may have held that scythe, tilled that land, sealed those jars. The colonial setting of the Burnaby Art Gallery in a fin-de-siecle lodge in Deer Lake Park reinforces this temporal connection, while the hair woven into the dress, frizzing at the ends and poking through the braids, brings viewers back to the body. 

Worn is nicely echoed in the next room by Freed, a work Jones completed this year. Here, a white Victorian-era dress borrowed from the nearby Burnaby Village Museum is surrounded by a curtain of hanging cotton bolls, the fruit of the cotton plant, and tufts of black hair formed into the same shape. 

While Worn has a sombre gravity, even a fearsome quality, because of the sheer volume of hair and the thickness of its material, the hair and cotton tufts of Freed are set loose. They hang as if floating, the dress reflecting light through its layers of diaphanous fabric. There’s a ghostliness to it. Perhaps it’s Freed that hits the more sinister tone, for one might well ask how this body came to be free.

The upper floors of the exhibition comprise The Golden Section, works that Jones made last year during a residency at the Burrard Arts Foundation in Vancouver. In this series, bleached blond hair is knotted onto vinyl mesh with a traditional wig-making technique. Curled into beach waves, or flat-ironed and braided, the hanging strands decorate the screen as if to explore their ornamental value. The works ask us to unpack Western beauty ideals and explore the privilege that accompanies golden tresses. After all, don’t blonds have more fun? ■

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Burnaby Art Gallery

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