CLAUDIA MUNRO





Art
2021 -
  1. Follow the Angel Down 
  2. Riddarhyttan on Iron - One to Twenty One
  3. Making Art Felt Like Lying, So I Cut Hair Like My Mother Instead
  4. A Performance of the Social Fabric
  5. Moonless Night
  6. BLESS YOUR HEART
  7. Lineage Found in Lambs
  8. A Trial and Error of the Social Carpet
  9. Dear Sweden, Give Me My Bones Back
  10. A Watery Commons


Design
2020 -  
  1. The Labour of Emotions, The Emotions of Textiles
  2. MERGE
  3. snob
  4. Overlap
  5. Various Posters


Words
2023 -
  1. Twenty Six Gallery texts
    there is a forest, and so we sell firewood text
    My Mother is a Hairdresser text
    BLESS YOUR HEART text
  2. Bread and Butter text
  3. The Labour of Emotions, The Emotions of Textiles interviews
  4. Kiss your friends (and tell them you love them) text


Info
  1. Hello! I am an artist/designer/writer from New Zealand/Sweden interested in the edges – where creative practices overlap and what can be made from the in between. 


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3. My mother is a hairdresser text



2025 
Written as part of ‘Making Art Felt Like Lying, So I Cut Hair Like My Mother Instead’ 






My mother is a hairdresser. 

My stepfather is a builder. 

I am from New Zealand, but I ran away some years ago to be seen as an intellectual. 

My father was an engineer who drank himself to death. 

My grandmother was a dressmaker, the flowers are for her. 

My grandfather was a truckdriver. 

My farmor was a housewife. 

My farfar was a priest. 

I don’t want to talk about class because to choose any side is patronising. All I know is that when I am sitting trying to search my mind for Kant quotes, all I find is the image of myself standing in the garage in front of my stepfather, trying to explain why this is relevant at all to his life where his hands are calloused and dinner is on the table. 

I have enjoyed being a little dumber. I went on antidepressants and I stopped being clever. I think my art got worse but my life got better. Who cares about what I say really. Oscar Wilde said “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely”. I like that. 

Can you please admire my hair intensely? Will you allow me to be so vain? I served it to you on the working class silver platter. It is alive but it is dead. It is human but it is decoration. It is charming but it is disgusting. I don’t want to talk about anything anymore. I will give you flowers and threads of DNA that I have cut lovingly from my friends heads. That will have to do art, that will just have to do.