Both Hair of the Dog works employ houndstooth wool surfaces quadruple sealed with acrylic matte gel and clear acrylic gesso, and embedded earthen materials with symbolic meaning. The primary title...
Both Hair of the Dog works employ houndstooth wool surfaces quadruple sealed with acrylic matte gel and clear acrylic gesso, and embedded earthen materials with symbolic meaning. The primary title of each work plays upon the saying, “Bite the hair of the dog that bit you.”
The Hair of the Dog I is embedded with a vertical frame of thickly applied Yule marble dust paste, taken from the mountain quarry in Marble Colorado from which the Lincoln Memorial for the 16th American president was unearthed in the early 1900s. Modelled after the Greek Parthenon, the monument has been admired as a symbol of preservation of unity, the formal emancipation of enslaved African people in the United States, and the promise of participatory democracy.
The image painted in dark blue halftone lines into the marble paste is a still from digitised film footage from the Associated Press archives, Today in History - Watts 1965. At that moment two Black men were being taken away by white police officers wearing protective headgear, with the night’s darkness, street lamps, and smoke behind them. The image painted is a still of digitised film footage from BBC archives, Uprising: The Events of 1981 are a key part of our national history. The cropped moment painted into the houndstooth shows an Afro-Caribbean man in Brixton being approached and physically handled by a police officer as others look on.