Anyone with long hair has no doubt experienced the phenomenon where, sometime in between shampooing your roots, scrubbing your body head-to-toe, evenly distributing conditioner with a wide-tooth comb, and shaving your legs, a great deal of hair seems to have fallen from your head. Not enough to be concerned about from a health standpoint, usually, but enough that it’s made kind of a mess. It’s all over the shower tile, it’s clogging the drain, and your roommate is furious.
So what do you do? You could task yourself with collecting each strand, one by one, to ensure that it’s been properly disposed of and that it won’t be the reason you (or your S.O.) need to buy a gallon jug of Draino next week. Or, if you’re Alabama-based artist Lucy Gafford, you could make some pretty cool art out of it.
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Gafford has created about 400 works of shower hair art since she first started experimenting with the medium a few years back. The artist says that her first attempt was with a squirrel design, as a joke, but has since graduated to much more elaborate shapes. Princess Leia, a wiener dog, Tyrion Lannister, and even Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream are all part of her repertoire — and Gafford says it takes her up to an hour and a half to complete each piece.
But hair art isn’t Gafford’s only artistic focus. An “all-around artist,” she does just about everything on the creative side, including painting, murals, sculptures, textile arts, and costume-making. Should her endeavors one day cease to satisfy her, we do have an idea of something that could be promising to look into (and lucrative, to boot): An endorsement deal from a hair-loss brand. You see where we’re going with this one, right?