Beauty Parlour

This photograph captures my first series of wig mannequin sculptures. The project began with the desire to celebrate the life and work of my hairdresser, New Haven based Jamaican stylist Karaine Smith-Holness. In 2025, she moved out of her salon of over two decades. That same spring, Beauty Plus, a Black-owned beauty supply store in New Haven was closing its doors after over 30 years. The owners agreed to sell me some of their old wig mannequins, and I went to work.

The result was Close to Floating, a multimedia exhibition of photography and sculpture. The exhibition title echoes the words of poet Akilah Oliver who, in the opening line of her 1999 book she said dialogues: flesh memory states that “close to floating is the saddest kind of survival”.

Salons and beauty supply stores exist in the space between ideals and reality. They are places of self-fashioning, and the beauty practitioners who run them are not simply service providers, but makers in their own right.

Wig mannequins are inherently surrealist objects, often sitting inside beauty shops for decades, absorbing and shedding facades as wigs are glued on and torn off. I view each mannequin sculpture as a portrait, highlighting the communities Black women build for one another to feel seen and beautiful. My practice asks how these mannequins, and by extension a society that favors Eurocentric features, can become a playground for Black women's self-expression.

(Photo Credit: Noah Keim)