Plaiting a new palette
By day, Midhun RR is an architect and professor of architecture. In his free time, though, he’s more like Edward Scissorhands — snipping, cutting, framing as he creates portraits using human hair.
An artist even before the hair, Midhun still works with oil and acrylic as well as wood, but hair satisfies him the most, he says. Toward the beginning, it was the strangeness of the material, but over the years it has also become the most meaningful of the mediums he works with. It is material memory, he says, something cared for and tended to, often at considerable expense. Why waste it when it could be turned into a permanent exhibit?
The hair affair began when he was interning with an architectural research firm in Puducherry. In a project that tested different materials’ suitability for use in construction supplies, he worked with rice, coconut husk and hair.
When the project was over, what remained was “a heap of human hair”. “A friend knew I dabbled in different mediums and suggested I make something from the extra hair,” says Midhun, 26.
His first creation in this medium was a Marilyn Monroe portrait that sits proudly in his home in Ooty. He now gets commissions for portraits made with hair, and he gets hair donations from friends, acquaintances, relatives and even strangers, who write in after coming upon his unusual art usually on social media sites.
You have to make sure the hair is clean or it can give you a skin infection, Midhun says. He learnt this the hard way.
Before it can hit the canvas, the hair must also be treated — blow-dried, allowed to rest in formaldehyde, and then dried in the sun for about two days.
It’s also crucial for his workspace to have the least possible movement of air. He even works with a mask on, ever since an ill-advised sigh once sent his carefully arranged material drifting in a myriad directions to the ground. “Cutting the hair into equal parts can be challenging. Bits of hair also don’t always stick to a surface the way you want them to,” he says.
Nonetheless, he perseveres. He’s recreated Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in hair as a gift for his parents. A touching commission he received recently was for a portrait of a one-year-old made with her own hair after it had been cut in a tonsure ceremony.
“Her uncle approached me and said he wanted to preserve the hair. It was a gift for the baby’s first birthday,” Midhun says. Arun Raghavendar, the uncle, found Midhun on a social media site and struggled to convince his relatives that the art work was a good idea. “The end product made them come around,” he says proudly.
Prices for Midhun’s hair portraits start at Rs 1,500, and when he doesn’t have commissions he hones his skill anyway, crafting likenesses of Mahatma Gandhi, Sachin Tendulkar and others out of donated locks.