Masooma Syed’s two untitled sculptures. Small, delicately made, and resembling undersea corals, these sculptures appear at first glance to be well-behaved art­works that sit placidly inside their vitrines. They seem even old-fashioned, in their direct mimesis of a natural object and the fineness of the skill involved in making them. On looking again one realizes that one of the sculptures is made by gluing nail-parings; the other is woven from human hair. In recent years a number of artists have used parts of their own body to make art, most commonly using blood as a medium for their work.

We have seen artists paint with it, and even make sculptures with their own frozen blood. The use of blood suggests self-mutilation and self-sacrifice, and asks us to think of art-malting as a wrenching and heroic act. For all the drama that blood evokes, if it is withdrawn from the body in a reasonable quantum it does renew itself without harming the person from whom the blood is taken. For an artist to harvest her own blood then should be only slightly different from using fallen hair1 or discarded nails. Yet these things that Syed uses are decidedly prosaic body parts. Instead of evoking martyrdom1 discarded hair and nails suggest something dirty and mildly embarrassing. The delicate beauty of the sculptures then tugs against the distasteful materials of which they are made, setting up a tension between our responses to what we see in the works and what we know about them.