My Victorian hair work collection enables prolonged material looking  and handling. An archive of bodily objects that I can revisit when working to unpick techniques that are absent from archival and technical historical documentation. Rather than operating as a fixed collection of works, it is a working field of material study.

​

These objects are used to explore and reconstruct obscured or partially lost hair work techniques, extending the same methodological approach used in my study of museum collections.

 

The collection has also been loaned to Bankfield Museum for the In Loving Memory exhibition (2025/26), where it was shown alongside the museum's holdings. This circulation forms part of an ongoing dialogue between private material study and institutional display.

 

Alongside physical engagement, the collection is also digitally documented as a form of archival resistance, an attempt to prevent further erasure of fragile or overlooked craft knowledge.

 

It operates as both a working research tool and a secondary archive of material histories.