"In order to source her materials, Meza-DesPlas runs her fingers through her hair every morning, holding onto the strands that fall out."

"She also collects her hair from the shower and, when it’s time to get to work, she sorts it from shorter hairs to longer hairs. It’s become a ritual for her."

“I like the dichotomy of using hair because there’s the idea that hair can be sexy and engaging to people and then on the other hand it can be repulsive, like a hair in your soup or a hair on your hotel pillow,” Meza-DesPlas explained....

“Hair has an unruliness to it, we try to control it and make it do certain things and hair has a mind of its own, it snakes out when it wants to and does certain things when it wants to,” she said. “It has a sense of life to it and I feel like my drawings have a sense of life to them."

Making art out of things that are not art materials is a very old idea. The trick is to support the old idea with verbal bullshit. And I'm sure people have made drawings/paintings out of actual bull shit.

Googling for something to link to support my assertion that this is a very old idea, I found a Cracked listicle titled "7 Horrifying Uses of the Human Body to Create Art" ("#4. Drinking Painted Milk and Puking It Onto a Canvas"). And I'm not going to use this precious segment of a Friday morning to research all the feminist art that has been made from menstrual blood.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lemondog says "Nothing new just a different style," pointing to a page showing the work of modern day practitioners of something called Victorian hair art, which I'm guessing had something to do with remembering the dead, similar to hair in a locket, but much more labor intensive. Okay, here's "The Lost Art of Sentimental Hairwork":

Mrs. Hamlin of Omaha, Nebraska left a rather curious heirloom to her descendants—an intricately woven bouquet composed entirely of human hair. Buried deep inside, each of its flowers is numbered with a tiny label corresponding one of fifteen names written on a separate index card; those of herself and her loved ones. More than a century ago, each of these people offered up their locks of brown or gray—literally, pieces of themselves—to provide the material for what would become a lasting symbol family unity.

The weaver need not have been the eccentric that one might suppose. On the contrary, she was likely to have been a conventional middle class lady going about her fancywork. She may have included a lock of her own in the wreath, but quite possibly she did not, preferring instead to be present as the sum of its parts; the invisible weaver of family ties. As a good 19th century woman, the domestic harmony she fostered was an expression of herself; her self-portrait in sacrifice.

 So is Hamlin like Meza-DesPlas or different? To my eye, the differences overwhelm the similarities.