Rapunzel doesn’t live here anymore

Women’s hair carries several myths and thrills with it. From the Nereids to Berenice and from Medusa to Rapunzel, long women’s hair has always been a symbol of femininity, charm or/and innocence.

Fairies and good deities were mostly represented with long—blonde—hair while ‘evil’ women and witches are also famous for their wild extended dark or red waves. So, long hair has also been functioning as an ambivalent identity signal of purity and desire, as in Botticelli’s Venus or the suave pre-Raphaelites’ women, and of evil and allurement, as in Munch’s Vampire or Cranach’s Judith.

Hair in braid, nonetheless, has been connected with other expressions of the female nature.

Very young girls had their hair made to plaits, but young single women could leave their hair loose until they got married. So plait may serve, apart from an age indication, as a symbol of obedience, innocence and humility. Cutting off the braid was always a kind of punishment after all, as it symbolised the depriving of woman’s grace and—mainly—dignity.

Returning to her familiar practices of mythos’ reappropriation, Lemos continues her artistic investigation into the symbols of contemporary femininity and their deconstruction, throughout a giant braid sculpture, an obscure still striking object, producing associations with either fairy tales and myths or punishment acts.  

In a constant dialogue with previous works of hers—the impressive long hair figure of Memory sculpture, for example—she keeps exposing the broad spectrum of restrictions and stereotypes a woman confronts. At the same time, as in her other Tools, Lemos’ enormous plait keeps up with a long genealogy line, coming from women surrealists, like Leonora Carrington, to contemporary feminist artists, like Annegret Soltau or Lorna Simpson, whose works, treating hair as a critical element of the dominant notion of beauty and thus the cultural perception of the overlapping space between femininity and obedience, are deconstructive and destabilizing.

The figure of the new woman-fighter, that rises as an ideal through the whole Lemos’ Tools of endearment series, rejects old beauty myths, reframing femininity outside the male gaze and creating its own model of being by refusing or even reapproaching external restrictions. And now it is the time to discard internal ones too.

Lemos, after dealing with acquired impositions on woman’s figure—through social imperatives and expectations translated into fashion objects like stiletto shoes or corsets—returns with an organic inherent element. Hair, an actual body feature, could function as a metaphorical device for thoughts, fears and beliefs, anything that comes from the inside.

The cutting of the plait thus, although giving at first sight an impression of punishment, is actually a gesture of disobedience, a revolutionary action against beauty stereotypes and any internalization of patriarchal impositions, an emancipation of thinking. The cutting off from old ideas and perceptions, a deep inner change, a liberation.

Biology tells us that the only living part of the hair is the no visible one. The hair that is visible exhibits no biochemical activity, considered thus dead. Lemos’ steel braid of unidentified colour, though, seems alive and dynamic. Like a terrible living creature, a sea—octopus-like—monster, a threatening entity or an alive, yet non-active anymore staircase through which Rapunzel’s story asks for a very different but obvious solution: no one can save the princess but herself.

 London 2019