Features Overview

What We Believe

Black hair has always been portrayed as intimidating. Intimidating to handle, accept, manipulate and hold. Historically, western societies have been taught to fear it.

Reject it.

Many more demand it tamed, conformed and destroyed. Shave it, cover it and shame it. You certainly shouldn’t embrace it much less love it. You’d better not unleash it. That would be “unprofessional”. Uncivilized. It’s impossible to escape the signalling unscathed.

It’s time to get unruly.

Seeing my nieces grow and learn to love themselves entirely is so beautiful and unbelievably sad. I wish I had embraced black and ethnic hair much more than I had during my youth. It was also a much different world then growing up when I was young. For what I wanted to achieve I was intoxicated by conformance.

I birthed this project on a whim. A feeling more than an idea really.

Unplanned and unprepared, yet inspired and compelled. I wanted to acknowledge what I saw as a boy growing up in a home filled with love and two black women. The connection between blackness, afrocentric hairstyles and the contradiction of society bucking against these natural things.

This is what I felt compelled to unpack. The recollection of moments, my memories of smells and snippets of conversation. The perspective of a first generation Canadian boy born to Jamaican parents. Flash forward 30 years, I see similar moments being lived through nieces who are old enough to know danger yet young enough to revel naïveté.

They love their hair. What’s missing is despair. There is none. It’s been exercised out of this house.