How To Make a Nest Out of Your Own Hair is an instructional performance presented through a step-by-step guide and video documentation. Framed as a practical domestic tutorial, the work stages a surreal yet matter-of-fact ritual, borrowing the visual language and perhaps authority of online instructional content.

The gesture is derived from a practice I studied in my grandmother’s daily routine: after brushing her hair, she would discreetly place her shed hair into a little coconut bowl nestled between pine branches in her yard. I would watch birds, one-by-one, fly to the little coconut bowl, collect a few strands, and fly off. By the end of spring, I imagined her pines full of nests with her hair carefully woven into their fragile structures. By translating an intimate, non-performative gesture into a public set of instructions, the work questions what is lost when care-based practices are removed from their original contexts and repackaged for visibility and replication.

step ● collect your hair until it amounts to the size of a small mandarin

step ●● wash hair with gentle soap

step ●●● while wet, shape the hair into a flat pancake, use scissors as needed

step ●●●● with a needle and thread, weave around the outer circumference of the hair

step ●●●●● pull thread create a small divot at the center

step ●●●●●● let dry

step ●●●●●●● lay your egg(s)