Material Contemplations in Cloth and Hair

A preoccupation with hidden labour links the work of Janis Jefferies and Emma Tarlo in this joint exhibition which brings together Jefferies' installation, Weaving and We with Tarlo's installation, Combings. Taking us backstage to cloth and hair factories in China and hair workshops in India and Myanmar, they draw attention to working landscapes in which materials, fibres and machines take on haunting proportions. Their photographs invite us to recognise connections that are often obscured between the lives of workers in Asia and the material products that end up in our highstreets and homes.

Weaving and We
How do we generate intensity in a world swamped with second- and third-hand imagery, in a world that has itself become a simulacrum? – Janis Jefferies

Janis Jefferies’s photographic series, ‘Weaving and We’ (2013), depicts workers at textile factories in and around Hangzhou. The photographs give a partial glimpse into the world behind the machinery, revealing scenes of the process of workers’ labour. We are accustomed to seeing the goods they produce all around us, but rarely do we see them - the makers. How might we effectively be made to see these textile workers as part of our ‘we’? How can we see them through a world swamped with images? We, as viewers, cannot disregard textile workers whose daily lives are intricately linked with cloth, material, dye and weave production. Jefferies experiments with techniques of ‘estrangement’ to render the photographic image more affective/ effective than the documentary images we are used to. Here the labour involved in textile production and maintenance is not a mark left for perpetuity but rather a caring for existence, for being in the present.

Combings

how many heads? how many hands? how many hairs?

Emma Tarlo’s images of hair reconstruct the hidden topography of labour concealed within a single packet of hair extensions purchased from a shop in Finsbury Park in North London. Taken over a three year period (2013- 2015) in India, China and Myanmar, her photographs track the slow and silent trajectory of combings – sometimes known as ‘dead hair’ in the trade. This is hair that has fallen out and been salvaged from the brushes and combs of long haired women. The images capture hair in limbo - after the moment it has become disconnected from heads across Asia but before it becomes attached to new heads in Europe, Africa or the United States. Robbed of intimacy and personal connection, hair takes on disturbing qualities. It and becomes mere fibre. Human waste. Yet it remains haunted by the presence and absence of those from whom it was harvested. Tarlo’s images force us to confront hair in all its rawness and invite us to contemplate both the ingenuity and cruelty of global connection.