My “Art” for Aging Gracefully

Venn Meditation on Aging Hair Color, 6x8”, 24 carat gold smalti, lustre glass, brass and aluminum wire, rock tumbler belts, flagstone remnant from my yard.

In the middle of the isolation for the Covid pandemic in 2020, I retired from my last job. I jumped into fulltime mosaicing (as well as my other obsessions of gardening and genealogy). I also paid more attention to my hair.

I had been coloring my medium brown hair with organic herbal henna-based hair dyes since I got my first gray hairs in the early 1990s. My goal was to match the lighter colored hair in front with the darker hair in back. I never achieved this, even after devoting more dyeing time to it. I bought a lot of new colors from my company in Germany, ordering a regular delivery (in German) by mistake. I now have a dozen boxes of useless hair dye that I’m embarrassed to give away.

In fact my hair took on increasingly brassy and reddish tones that looked awful.

So I tried to remove the color using special clarifying shampoos and vodka, and by sleeping with coconut and olive oil on my wrapped head. After months of this the yellowish color still wasn’t gone so I made the leap to just let it grow out.

In the middle of this agonizing process, I watched Rachel Sager’s newest Mosaic Arts Online video about Venn diagram mosaic. She framed them as a way to show progression or change, using the overlapping sections (she called it the “liminal space”) to show that change. I immediately knew what to do and gathered the components before I even finished the video!

I quickly designed and made this piece to show the evolution of my hair color. I love the mosaic piece more than my hair, of course. The process of making it, though, seemed to allow me a way to process my feelings about this change.

The gray I dreaded has turned out to be more silvery blond. Now, six months later, I’m starting to like my hair more than I have in many years.