Why I Keep My Head Shaved

"Hair means a timeline. Hair means a connection. Hair means a history."

When I first read those words from visual artist Paola Fernanda, something clicked. Not clicked—snapped. Like the sound scissors make cutting through canvas, or the buzz of clippers against scalp. I thought about my own shaved head in relation to all the cutting I've been doing. The shredding of photographs, the slicing through twenty-five years of paintings, the dismantling of everything I'd made.

Sometimes I don't realize what I'm doing until years later. Then it all comes together.

July 14, 2012. The Brewery Artist Lofts. I had my head shaved live in front of an audience while my virtual avatar Gracie watched from her perfect digital world projected behind me. The performance was called "The Bald and the Beautiful"—a deliberate middle finger to a media-saturated culture that reduces accomplished women to their hair choices. Portia cuts her signature locks, Charlize shaves for a film role, and suddenly that's the story. Not their talent. Not their work. Their hair.

I said I wouldn't grow it back until society changed.

That was thirteen years ago.

July 14, 2012

The thing about cutting off your hair—really cutting it, not just getting a trim—is that it's irreversible in the moment. Unlike my paintings, which I can slice and reconstruct, unlike my photographs that become fragments to be reassembled, hair forces you into waiting. Into accepting what you've done. Into living with the choice.

But here's what I discovered: keeping it shaved became its own practice.

Every few weeks, I run the clippers over my scalp. Same motion, same ritual, same refusal. Each buzz is a small death, like the cuts I make through canvas. A letting go. A making space. It's meditative now—this regular erasure of growth, this insistence on starting over.

My shaved head connects to everything else I've been destroying and preserving. The hair I buzzed off in 2012? I kept it. A jar of my own hair sits in my studio alongside fragments of paintings, shredded photographs, pieces of dismantled mannequins. All these pieces of former selves, waiting.

In a world that tells women our worth lives in our ability to perform beauty correctly, my bald head is a daily act of refusal. Not just the initial shaving—that was dramatic, sure, but drama fades. The power is in the maintenance. The choosing, again and again, to reject the timeline hair represents.

Because hair does mean history. My shaved head erases the markers of time that hair carries. No bad hair days, no gray roots betraying age, no expensive cuts or colors or styling. Just the shape of my skull. Just me, stripped of one more thing society uses to categorize and judge women.

The virtual world promised effortless beauty—Gracie could have perfect hair forever. But in physical space, I chose something more radical: the refusal of beauty performance altogether.

My head stays shaved because the world hasn't changed enough. Women are still reduced to their appearance. Bodies like mine are still marginalized, still subjected to impossible standards. The beauty industry still profits from our shame.

But also—and this might be more important—I keep it shaved because I love how it feels. The simplicity. The honesty of my skull's shape. The way it connects to my practice of cutting and letting go. How it makes space, literally and metaphysically, for who I'm becoming.

Each time I buzz it down, I'm not destroying. I'm maintaining. I'm choosing, again, to refuse the rules I didn't write.

Some mornings I run my palm over my scalp and think about all the hair in that jar, all the fragments waiting to be reconstructed into something new. The cutting was just the beginning. The real work is in the growing back—not of hair, but of self. In the space that shaving creates.

Hair means a timeline, connection, history.

My bald head means freedom.

June 20, 2025