About a decade ago, while in grad school, artist Verónica Pérez received a strange gift: a trash bag full of hair.

And she immediately put the furry find to good use.

“That was my foray into using hair to represent a human or a body, without actually putting a body into the piece,” says Pérez of their method of creating sculptures.

Since that time, the artist’s main medium has become artificial hair.

Perez is among the 14 artists who are showing their works at the “Ravel” exhibit at the Boston Sculptors Gallery.

While Perez uses hair to create arts, their colleague, Jongeun Gina Lee, another artist at the show, prefers more solid media: clay, glass, glaze, fabric, thread, and metals such as lead and alloys such as zinc.

The Sampan recently interviewed both Pérez and Lee about their works and approach to sculpting.

Pérez, who uses they and them pronouns, explained how they prefer the use of hair, because it helps create a sense of layers – like an onion that can be peeled back to reveal more of itself over time.

“And so that’s what the hair does for me,” said Pérez. “And I think that’s why I’ve been investigating it for so long. Because I feel like even if you don’t have hair, you still kind of have a relationship with hair. Everybody has hair. It’s like a very mundane thing that sometimes we don’t even think about, but it’s always there, and it always will be there. Like, after death, hair is still there,” Pérez added.

“I think that that’s what’s inspired me to work with hair. People can glom onto it and feel themselves inside of that piece. Even if it’s not the same colored hair, even if it’s not the same textured hair, they can
see the humanistic qualities that my sculptures bring and hopefully have a kind of visceral reaction when they’re interacting with my work.”

Pérez will be exhibiting a large piece at Ravel called, “Bore in the Darkness of Our Hair after SZA,” which is accompanied by a poem by Maya Williams.

Lee said she is exploring lead and other alloys such as zinc in her more recent work and says she is looking forward to potentially using precious metals in the future. Lee is currently working on three sculptures for the Ravel show to make a small installation that will be featured in the gallery that will fill approximately 5 feet of gallery space called “Shift no. 2”.

“For this specific show, I continue working on my work theme, which is like, ‘I’m looking for everything in nature, going through its own journey. And I see myself as a small particle of a larger cycle in nature. And I see everything in nature going through its linear journey in time and space’,” said Lee.

“So for me, this linear sense of journey, which is like some movement, or it could be time or life cycle, journey, change, evolution, or it could be either increasing or decreasing, so everything in life or nature basically moves towards earth or death. I project my own life into what I make. And I imagine each piece of my work is on its own journey. I look for this fine balance of fragility and solidity. I’m looking for resilience and this hidden energy that pushes everything in life through their precarious journey. “

On Becoming ‘Artists’

Both sculptors said that it wasn’t until recently that they could consider themselves to be artists.

“It took me a pretty long time and if you ask me when I felt comfortable with calling myself an artist, I was already in my 40s,” said Lee.

Pérez had a similar experience not willingly calling themselves an artist until they were in their 40s.

“I finally felt comfortable saying, ‘I’m an artist,’ only maybe a few years ago. I’m in my 40s right now. And I was just always like, if I say, ‘I’m an artist,’ people are going to be like, ‘What do you do? You
just sit in your studio and do nothing all day?’ Artists, really, they’re like excavators. They’re researchers. They pull this information out from the depths and present it to people in a different way. And so,
I really started to feel comfortable calling myself an artist maybe only five or six years ago, but I think I’ve always felt like an artist because when I was a kid, I was always making and creating just weird little things and kind of off in my own world, trying to disseminate the world around me through these different methods. I think I’m always an artist, but I think I’ve started to feel comfortable calling myself an
artist only a few years ago.”

Metal, Hair and Expression

Both Pérez and Lee dig into themes of identity and belonging in their work.

“This is sort of the core of my thing,” said Lee. “So, you know in life, we don’t get to choose where we belong. You don’t really choose your parents. You don’t get to choose your ethnicity. I had this Korean
culture that I had struggles with. So, then it became my motive to look for the purpose of life. I started looking at my surroundings. And then everybody’s just a small particle of the larger cycles. And then you get to think about death and life. And then I found lines.”

Lee says she uses lines to express these themes.

Pérez uses their work to discuss issues around the feelings of loss and separation from their Puerto Rican culture after their father emigrated to the United States, and to explore the history of colonization and
gentrification that has taken place on the island.

“Even though there’s like this silencing and this pushing back and this darkness, we’re still here. There’s still this area of growth that is happening.”

They spoke about leading braiding circles as a part of their artistic practice, which are workshops where people come together and talk about identity-based experiences while braiding synthetic hair. These
conversations are recorded then played through a Bluetooth speaker as a part of a sculpture and the braids are incorporated into a larger sculpture.

“I really like this mixture of sculpture and story to kind of get these issues out to people in a different way than being very didactic and having someone read something, they’re almost like talking to a body.
Because the sculptures that I make are very large and very big. It’s like you’re negotiating. Is this a person? There’s a person’s voice coming from this. And hopefully through that interaction with the sculpture, people’s minds can start to change in maybe a little tiny way. I’m not saying I’m the best social justice warrior of all time, but I’m trying to do my part to get people to understand differences in
where we all come from.”

Both artists said that while they find community with other artists, supporting their work is challenging, so exhibits such as Ravel become especially precious.

”I’ve been looking for artsy fartsy people for my whole life because my immediate family didn’t believe in art,” said Lee. “And my parents, they all had some artistic sides. But then, Korean society has changed really rapidly in their lifetime. Their priority wasn’t art, it was hard for them to change. For my generation things were changing too fast for them to catch up, so they couldn’t really believe that art can be a job, or
art can be some important thing for you. So, for me, belonging to an artist group gives me a kind of unique, kind of happiness. I love conversations with other artists. Like, I get inspired by looking at
different types of work and different types of processes.”

Pérez recalled visiting the Boston Sculptors Gallery as a graduate student and being impressed with the space.

“I was like ‘I want to show there one day.’ That was a little goal I had for myself.”

“Ravel: Associate Artists Group Exhibition” runs through Feb. 23 with an artist’s reception on Feb. 15 from 2 – 5 p.m. and a closing reception on Feb. 23 from 3 – 5 p.m. at the Boston Sculptors Gallery on Harrison Avenue.