Allana Clarke West Indies, b. 1987

This work is the latest in Allana Clarke’s series of performative, wall-mounted sculptures made from 30 Sec. hair bonding glue, a material that has become signature to Clarke’s practice. The liquid latex is commonly used to adhere hair extensions onto a person’s scalp. To create these works, Clarke first pours thousands of 8-oz. bottles of the gloopy, black liquid onto mesh screens. She then wrestles with the material over the course of weeks as it slowly dries. Clawing, pulling, twisting, and scraping at the gradually-less-mutable surface with her bare hands and feet, Clarke imposes her physical and emotional will onto the substance. The undertaking transforms her medium’s appearance and value. Clarke pioneered her performative sculptural method in order to create a tangible history of someone grappling with and moving through systems meant to denigrate conceptions of Blackness. “What is important for me in the process of rearticulating this material is that it has become free—a completely new context has been created for it,” Clarke says. “This work is about freedom.” Though not implicitly negative, hair extensions become self-defeating when they’re socially encouraged as a way of attaining closer proximity to ideas of whiteness—for example, when rules or laws legislate against natural Black hair styles. When you cannot access social mobility unless you participate in a system that denigrates what is inherent to your being, you exchange something of your essence for the hope of simply moving through the world with a bit more ease. “As I developed the works I was thinking deeply about my relationship to the color black, approaching it as a space for discovery, experimentation, and multiplicity,” Clarke says. “My performance actions are embedded in the material and cured upon its surface. The longer you spend time with its blackness, the longer you rest with it, the longer you are in proximity to it, you begin the process of grasping its reality.”