The majority of Leila’s collection is from the Victorian period which stretched from 1837 to 1901. Like bustled black dresses or silver lachrymatory used to bottle tears (also on display in Leila’s vestibule), hair jewelry was part of the pageant of mourning in the mid to late 19thcentury. Hair was sometimes taken from the dead, wrapped around wire and worked into filigree sculptures then preserved under glass. In other cases the hair of the deceased was used to make jewelry which was considered modest enough to wear during mourning when most pieces would have to be retired for a year and a day. This funereal context is how we think of hairwork today if we think of it at all, but the docent is correct, most of it wasn’t so grim. Families tracked genealogy through horseshoe-shaped wreaths and documented each relation with labeled flowers made from their hair. Women exchanged locks as tokens of friendship. Weddings were commemorated by weaving the couple’s hair together or by a wife making her husband a fob or ring of her hair to keep with him.
There are examples of all of these types of hairwork at Leila’s museum. The museum itself is housed in a generic 70s commercial building that looks like it ought to be a Goodwill or a used car dealership. The mirrored windows make it look vacant from the outside and inside the fluorescent lights add to the funeral pall which the docent is eager to cast off. She tells me about the museum’s namesake: Leila Cohoon, the retired beautician who became fascinated with human hair art when she bought her first piece at an antiques shop in 1956. She’s been exhibiting her collection to the public since 1986. Leila is alive and well but she isn’t at the museum today except in the way that she always is—in a frame near the door where she’s shaped clippings from her platinum bouffant into a bedazzled spray of daisies. The docent tells me that Leila used Elmer’s glue to hold the strands together but the Victorians probably would have used egg whites or sugar water. Of the thirty techniques that Leila has identified for making hair art, she practices twenty-six.
Despite my tour guide’s initial protestations and the liveliness of Leila’s daisies, the specter of death is always near, even when the hair pieces weren’t created for mourning. One family tree lists the marriage and death dates for all but one daughter. “So we know who made this piece” the docent points out as I imagine this last daughter, never married, documenting the death of her entire family. Another family piece is simpler—children’s hair arranged in ringlets by their mother. Each child has multiple entries so you can see their baby-fine hair get coarser and darker over time, except for the youngest who only has one entry at three weeks. Freud had a theory about collecting. He saw it as a reaction to the separation anxiety and loss of control we felt as children when our bodily fluids came out of us and were taken away. In a way it reminds me of this mother who collected her children, including the lost child, which were once a part of her. Freud’s focus on bodily functions seems crude but the corporeality seems right. It’s easy to see how small pieces of people could be cherished and collected in an era when death came too soon and even young people amassed collections of dead friends. This difficult truth turns up unexpectedly in a wreath made of brightly dyed white horsehair—an unexpected rainbow in a sea of chestnut brown and dishwater blonde. The docent notes that white hair art is almost always from horses— many in the Victorian era never lived to go gray.