DUST THOU ART

Gemma doesn’t accept hair from strangers. She will emphasize this. After her first artist talk, she wrote in big letters at the top of her notepad: “Be explicit: no hair!”

Washed hair that her friends scoop daily from their shower drain catchers and seal in Ziplock bags—that’s the hair she uses as embroidery thread. She loves to peel the Ziplocks open and smell the bits her friends’ scalps discarded. She writes their names in Sharpie on the bags, but she can identify each by scent: cucumber—Madison, who still shops at Bath & Body Works; incense—Wendi, who uses Argan oil on her curls; a Christmas tree farm—Adrian, who has dandruff.

Hair doesn’t make good thread. It breaks and snarls as Gemma’s needle pulls through fabric. But that’s the point. The director of the arts center in Nebraska, where Gemma is halfway through a month-long residency, understands. During her introduction of Gemma at Open Studio Night, she foregoes the adjectives Gemma heard before: intricate, spellbinding, painstakingly beautiful. She cuts right to the meaning of Gemma’s work: “By embroidering textiles with human hair, the artist explores the impermanence of physicality.” This interpretation, the way her art is seen, instills new confidence in Gemma. When she stands up, she doesn’t immediately refer to her notepad, warped and smudged though this is only its second use, and she likes her extemporaneous opening better than anything she wrote down. “The body is fragile. We are more art than we are machine.” 

Behind Gemma hangs the project she expects to complete by the end of her residency: a 5x7 foot hair-embroidered rendition of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” except instead of Adam, Gemma lies at the center. (Her skin: John Elizabeth’s wheat blonde; her hair: Avery’s walnut brown.) When Gemma first saw a print of Michelangelo’s fresco, in her 6th grade art class, the distance between God’s and Adam’s fingers confirmed her fear that God was not, in fact, a benevolent heavenly father. She read that the painting depicts the moment just before God reaches Adam and gives him life, yet that didn’t comfort her. Michelangelo created ornate, idealistic images—alabaster skin, bodies that are somehow both muscular and supple. But even Michelangelo’s romanticized imagination couldn’t fathom God touching a human. 

Gemma’s version depicts the moment after her figure has come to life: Gemma reaches for God, and God sits back and lights a cigarette.

Gemma grew up believing in the creation myth. Working with human-sourced materials confirmed that she’d been right to reject it. God designed our bodies like this, to snap, to slowly ruin? For a few years, she believed in both God and evolution, that God set our world’s development in motion then left us to it, and we, as fallible human beings, fucked up. That became less plausible, too—or rather, deplorable. She couldn’t trust a God that abandoned his children to self-sabotage. 

All this, Gemma omits from her Open Studio Night talk. She concludes with her new creed: “I believe in the complicated beauty of the human body, of the delicate present.” 

Fifteen minutes later, a number of the audience linger in Gemma’s studio, their plastic cups of wine distressingly close to her displays. When the stranger, a man—Craig, she thinks, he looks like a Craig—offers Gemma his hair—a birds’ nest of brittle strands—she is polite. “No, thank you.” She deploys the kind of grin that would normally precede a wink. “No hair from strangers, remember?”

She already knows: the courteous no her mother taught her doesn’t affect some men. When she was a girl, it was the men who wore suit jackets to church, instead of polos or plaid button-ups like everyone else. As a 27-year-old woman, it’s men who look like Craig: white, wrinkles so deep his suntan doesn’t reach the bottoms, brown ponytail braid, Tevas that expose toenails thick with fungus. (It’s also still men who wear suit jackets.)

The hair is loose in his hand. Probably he picked it off his hair brush.

He says, “I picked this off my hair brush for you!”

“What a gift!” Gemma knows Craig won’t notice her sarcasm, unable to fathom a woman who means something counter to what she says.

“Yeah! I live nearby and rushed to grab it after your presentation.” He outstretches his hand and shakes the hair, like she is a dog and his hair is a toy. 

“Like I said in my talk though, I only use hair from people I know. Loved ones.”

“I listened to you share about your art.” Craig beats his flat palm against his chest. “Your soul. I know you. I totally know you.”

Gemma sucks her lips between her teeth. 

Craig turns to the nearest piece, titled “Dreams”: a pillowcase with a man embroidered in brunette (Ellie’s) and a fiery orange (Kenzie’s) chariot. It’s the prophet Elijah from the Old Testament riding his whirlwind to heaven, but tonight a woman asked if it’s a carriage “like in Pride and Prejudice?” Instead of answering, Gemma listed the fabrics she uses for the embroidery: old pillowcases, t-shirts abandoned in her apartment by people she briefly dated, her favorite summer dress from grade school.

Craig says, “I’d like to think of my hair immortalized in your art, out in the world where it can inspire people.”

Gemma wants to laugh. Immortalized. Hair decays. Fabric unravels. She selects materials that are quick to degrade. Temporality is such an obvious theme in her work, but he doesn’t want to see it.

“I’m sure you would.” She hovers her hand over his arm, the same distance between them that exists between God and Adam in Michelangelo’s painting.

He looks at her and blinks. He holds out his hair again.

She envisions how this will end. She will lift her chin, broaden her shoulders, and deploy the firm no she’s taught herself. Craig will respect her directness.

Here’s how it does end: Craig continues to offer until Gemma runs out of deflections. She passes him an empty Ziplock; she doesn’t touch the hair. She asks his name so she can Sharpie it on the bag, and he says “Dennis,” so she wasn’t too far off. Gemma comforts herself with the fact that he is the only person here who offered his hair, and she made him no promises. 

The next day, Gemma is only able to embroider God’s cigarette pack (Marlboro Golds—Taylor’s). She keeps getting interrupted. The people from Open Studio Night who witnessed Gemma relent to Dennis bring her their hair, too. 

Mrs. Fisher knocks on the window of Gemma’s studio door at 7:19 a.m., so hard the glass rattles. When Gemma opens the door, Mrs. Fisher bustles in as though she’s visited many times before.

“Thank goodness you’re awake! I planned to stop by on my way home from the grocery store, but when I got in my car, I said to myself, ‘Sandra, you need to buy ice cream, how could you forget?’ Benny’s coming over, and there are two things he eats at grandma’s house: chili with a side of cinnamon roll and apple pie with a scoop of vanilla. Has to be vanilla.” 

She unloads fistfuls of long shiny white hair from her purse, stuffing them in the crook of her arm.

“So when I saw your light on, I thought I’d do the ice cream a favor and pop in now.” Mrs. Fisher offers Gemma her elbow full of hair. “I doubt Dennis has used shampoo since before you were born. Thought you could use this.” 

Gemma considers saying no, but she can’t capitulate to a man then refuse a woman. “Let me grab a Ziplock.” She tells herself to think of Mrs. Fisher’s donation as flattering, or as Dennis’s fault.  

But Mrs. Fisher’s is the first that day in a slew of unwanted endowments.

More long whites from Mrs. Barneston, and short greys from a man who insists she call him Gramps and gives her a butterscotch candy. Snippets of auburn from Lacey, who cut her own hair in her kitchen for Gemma. A single box braid from Jess, who was going to get her hair re-done anyway. Various shades of dog fur from Pat Traxler, who knits scarves from people’s pet fur on commission. Blue curls from Margo Foss, who, after 61 years of being a platinum blonde, grew weary of answering the question, “Is that your natural hair color?”  

Gemma takes each Ziplock and lifts it above her head, the way her former pastor raised the communion bread as he blessed it, then tapes the bag on the wall next to “Dreams” so the people can regard their hair on exhibit. By the time Margo Foss arrives with her velvet pouch of blue hair, Gemma must swallow the burn in her throat as she presses the Ziplock seal.

She turns her table so that her back faces the hair, so she doesn’t have to look at the collage of plastic and hair and drafting tape. 

Artists like to say time to work is the best gift of a residency, but Gemma conceptualizes it differently: the gift is that time seems finite.

When Gemma was a believer, the concept of eternity made her feel small and unmoored, like nothing she did had consequence. The maw of endless time gobbled up every action, unnoticed, the way a quinoa seed could wedge between her molars and she wouldn’t know until she flossed it out, tiny and round, clinging to the white waxed string. 

After Gemma left Little Rock Bible Church and fled to Chicago, she realized everyone—believer, atheist, agnostic—longed for permanence. The same priggish condescension that she’d directed toward people skeptical of Christianity, she now felt about others seeking security (a full-time job, marriage, retirement savings). Her former inner monologue of “You don’t believe in Hell? You’ll be sorry!” became “You have ‘peace of mind’? That’s code for: complacency!” 

Every morning for the third and fourth weeks of her residency, Gemma walks into her studio and feels more complacent than she did the day before.

In week three, with her back to the wall, the hair becomes visible in her mind’s eye. At first, it only happens when she is settling into or coming out of a focused period. Then the vision of the hair begins to appear to Gemma as she works, so abruptly she stops embroidering without realizing it. When she comes to, her hand is suspended over the hoop, and she doesn’t know how long her needle hung in the air. 

Two years ago, when Gemma’s neighbor, Jeff in 3b, announced he’d paid off his car, he said, “It’s a relief, you know? To have something that’s mine? Like, nobody can take it away from me.”

Gemma egged Jeff’s car that night. Opened her window that overlooked the parking lot and launched a whole dozen at that blue Hyundai Elantra. Snickered about it into her bourbon.

That was a Friday. Jeff didn’t come out to his car until Sunday morning. Gemma, drinking coffee next to the window, watched Jeff gasp and rub and sprint for paper towels. It was too late, of course. The eggs, sun-crisped onto the paint, had already done damage. 

For so many years, she’d been expected to be a good girl, living in God’s love, radiating his joy. Gemma just wanted to matter. Not as a daughter of the King or a member of the Body. As herself. As an individual. As a human in this world. 

But fingers wrapped around her mug, Gemma felt remorse. She tightened her hold on the cheap stoneware, let the transferred heat blaze into her palm. Drunkenly launching eggs at her nice neighbor’s new car was not the way to leave her mark.

Gemma asked her roommate for his hair that very afternoon. 

Transience began to ground Gemma. The fact that her art will someday fade away heightens its impact. Knowing that life will end—hard stop—imbues each of her days with meaning. 

In the fourth week of her residency, she finds that she’s unconsciously worked other images into the piece. When she goes to embroider God’s face, she looks down and discovers she’s made a dog’s instead. She stitches kitchen shears into Gemma’s hand, a butterscotch candy inside Gemma’s navel. 

Gemma sits in her studio, God (Jackie’s ash blonde) spread over her lap, the fabric pooling at her feet, the hair of many Nebraskans cluttering her mind. 

She thought she had found a new way to live. But these people studied her art. They listened to her talk. They heard an expert apply the words “impermanence of physicality” to Gemma’s work. And still, they shoved their hair into her hands. Pleading.

The last full day of her residency, the day before she’s supposed to pack up, Gemma walks to the Ziplock labeled “Dennis.” Her piece lays across her work table, a third of it left to finish. A minute ago, she opened her eyes to find embroidered Gemma wearing a Teva sandal. 

Silt gathers in the bottom crease of the Ziplock. 

How long had Dennis’s hair been decaying on the brush before he cleaned it off? For how long did he run his brush, bulging with dead hair, over the hair still alive on his head, the new hair sprouting from his follicles, the fully grown hairs cascading over his collarbones, the old hairs waiting for the final tug of the bristles to release their weakening claim on his scalp? 

Through the plastic, she squishes the dust between her fingers.

She has yet to witness a piece of her art disintegrate. Her friends’ hair, the fabrics that held some significance to her—they have yet to fall apart in her hand. 

Or maybe some of them have. Maybe the first ones she made, stored in bins under her bed, have disintegrated unseen, without her noticing. Madison and Wendi and Adrian—turned to dust. 

Suddenly, Gemma longs for church. The stillness that settles during a sermon—she misses that. The hour every week when she was anchored, when she could sit for so long the flesh on the backs of her knees stuck to the wooden pew. When the only expectation was that she sit and think of God. When she believed that, yes, she would face death, but then she and everyone she loved would continue on, together in glory. There is security in smallness.

Sometimes, as Gemma works, she puts her lips to the fabric of her piece and whispers, For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. It had been a charge to herself: live fully. 

Now, she cries it into Dennis’s Ziplock, surrounded by the hair of strangers, her wet lips sticking to the plastic. 

On departure day, Gemma folds “The Creation of Gemma” and puts it in her car. She throws away the hair but keeps the Ziplocks, for the environment’s sake, crossing Xs through the names. When she drags the garbage out and drops it on the curb, the bag slumps over. On its side, lying there, its bulges—the tea she used for dye, the packaging from the ramen she cooked on the hot plate in her studio, the hair—make the bag appear like it could be animate. Of course, it’s not. 

Inside the trash bag, Dennis’s split-ended greys jumble with the other hair foisted onto Gemma. Dennis and the others will go on believing their hair has been transformed into art while it rots in their town’s landfill, with their garbage, so close to home. 

But as she walks away from the hair, Gemma has a vision of what she could create out of it: a tableau of the Crossing of the Red Sea. The Israelites escaping the Egyptians, their captors, by passing between walls of parted water. The horizon is all blue—the Israelites can’t see the other shore, have no idea what awaits them. But they press forward. They live within a miracle.  

Margo Foss’s curls could be the undulating sea. Lacey’s auburn and Jess’s black and Pat Traxler’s fur could be fish. Mrs. Fisher and Mrs. Barneston and Gramps could be sharks, eels, rays of light in the water. Dennis could be the Israelites, making their legendary passage, every step heavy with consequence.

Gemma pictures Jeff’s face when he discovered the eggs on his car. The disappointment. Then quickly: an idea. A pivot toward hope, even as the paint flaked off in his hand. 

Gemma tugs on the trash tie until it rips, rummages through the bag, moves aside the grapefruit peels and damp coffee grounds to retrieve the hair. They wrap around her fingers, wiggle through her rings, dance against her palms. She stretches out the front of her shirt, gathers the tufts of hair into the fabric, and carries them all back, nestled against her body.

Regardless of whether they’re sewn into a bedsheet or sealed into a Ziplock, the hair will turn to dust. Gemma knows that. But for a time, the hair will make something beautiful. Be part of something bigger until time leaches the hair of color, the grey hair turns to dust, the dust drifts away, until even the dust exists only in Gemma’s memory. Until, with time, her memory transforms, too.