Most people have a deeply personal, often conflicted, relationship with their hair. Hair can inspire confidence, shame, comfort, and frustration—sometimes all at once. Hair texture, style, and its cultural associations have influenced the work of Assistant Professor Althea Murphy-Price, who joined the printmaking program at UT Knoxville this year.
Murphy-Price uses hair in the printing process, giving her works a sense of depth that goes beyond most static images. One print shows a stenciled design of swirling leaves and stems; up close, one can see the dotted nature of the ink and the scattering of hair clippings that bleed beyond the edge of the pattern. Another presents an assortment of small clumps of hair connected to each other by thin, wiry strands, with some tendrils snaking into the distance.
"I find resolution in working in lithography and screen printing, in which I'm able to use photo-based processes to reinvent the linear quality of hair," she says.
Lithographic printing allows Murphy-Price to use actual hair in printmaking. She places the hair on a photo-sensitive surface, which transfers the image to the printed matrix. The result is a detailed image in which the smallest scattering of hair fibers can be seen.
Originally from Colorado, Murphy-Price attended Spelman College in Atlanta and received her M.A. from Purdue University. She received an M.F.A. from Temple University's Tyler School of Art, which is where she began to explore the role of fibers in printmaking.
"While I was at Temple, I began working in a direction similar to what I do now," she says, "working two- and three-dimensionally, in print media as well as in sculpture, working with fiber-based materials, and I started investigating hair's cultural significance."
Historically and culturally, hair has played a large and complicated role in the African-American community. Murphy-Price questions the very familiar and personal relationship she finds when working with human and synthetic hair, and it is this relationship between race and identity that she continues to explore.
But in addition to its cultural significance, hair is an expression of one's individuality, and Murphy-Price wants to examine these links, as well, including her own relationship with her hair.
"The work isn't entirely about hair," she explains. "It's also about self-perception and how we define ourselves. For me, it's about expressing what is very human in the relationship to the body, which is something I want to emphasize in my work."
