The face arrives twice. First as skin, then again across a fall of hair. Shannon Romano’s portrait holds for a second before the body turns and it breaks into thousands of moving strands.
One body carries several images. None gets the last word. This is the world Romano has been building as PIGMENT: one where hair refuses its supporting role. It does not frame the picture. It carries it. Mouths, eyes, skulls and half-remembered people surface inside the lengths, briefly align and disappear the second a body decides to move.
Calling the pieces wigs explains the object and misses the encounter. Romano paints directly onto thousands of individual hairs, building imagery through cascading layers. The result is neither a flat painting nor a static sculpture. It is a portrait with its own weather.
Romano is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice lives between hair, sculpture, painting, identity and transformation.
She arrived there through duration, not novelty. More than 25 years immersed in hair gave her an intimate knowledge of how the material behaves: its structure, movement, shine, resistance and transformative charge. That knowledge is not the backstage preparation for her art. It is the foundation of it.
There is a person inside that length of time: someone who kept looking at a material the culture had already categorised as beauty work and saw that it had not been exhausted. Romano did not abandon the craft to become an artist. She stayed with it until the categories around it began to look too small.
“Faces emerge from within the hair, simultaneously revealing and concealing the person beneath.”
Shannon Romano, artist statement supplied to FRENZY
Years inside the material.
The internet makes PIGMENT feel instantaneous: a head turns and the impossible reveals itself. The work behind that second is slow. Romano has spent decades learning a surface that separates, sways and catches light differently from every angle. This is not mastery as control, but an intimacy deep enough to know how much movement an image can survive.
Painting without a flat surface.
A conventional painter can trust the canvas to stay where it was left. Romano cannot. The human head is the form; the hair is both surface and volume; the wearer completes the work by making it unstable. She builds imagery through cascading layers “as though chiseling into a sculpture,” except the sculpture can walk away.
The images must work with and against movement. From one position, a face becomes legible. From another, it stretches into abstraction. That failure to resolve is essential. Identity, in Romano’s work, does not wait underneath the styling as a fixed truth. It keeps being made in public.
The angle is part of the artwork.
2FACED moves from portrait to interference as the wearer changes position. Shannon Romano / PIGMENT
The image does not sit on the hair. It moves with it.
Call it painting and the canvas is alive. Call it sculpture and the surface refuses to stay solid. Call it portraiture and the subject will not hold still long enough to become one fixed person. PIGMENT works because every label is briefly convincing and finally incomplete.
A face can become a whole crowd.
LOVESICK turns beauty’s promise of self-expression into something louder and less obedient. Shannon Romano / PIGMENT
Hair can hide you and tell on you.
Romano calls hair both material and metaphor: a vehicle for transformation, self-expression, concealment and revelation. Those ideas are normally kept separate. Change your hair to show the real you. Hide behind it to avoid being seen. PIGMENT lets both happen in the same frame.
At the centre of her practice is constructed identity and the many versions of self a person can inhabit. Her work asks where the identity we create ends and the person underneath begins, then refuses to make that border easy to find.
Concealment becomes another portrait.
In GHOST(ZZZ), disappearing is not the opposite of being seen. Shannon Romano / PIGMENT
The next PIGMENT won’t fit on a head.
Romano’s interest in transformation is not only visible in the work. She is living through one herself. After more than 25 years inside hair, she is deliberately moving the practice further into the art world and developing a larger installation practice over the coming year.
Until now, the human head has given the image its architecture. It curves the canvas, gives it dimension and interrupts its legibility through motion. Installation opens that system outward. Instead of one person carrying the work through a room, the room can begin to behave like the work: layered, unstable and changed by every new position.
This is not an escape from beauty into “serious” art. Hair is not an apprenticeship Romano must abandon before the work can count. She is expanding the intelligence developed inside beauty—the knowledge of bodies, surfaces, transformation and the selves people construct—into a language of sculpture, painting and the subconscious.
“I am currently transitioning my work into the art world and developing a larger installation practice this coming year.”
Shannon Romano, in a message to FRENZY
Romano is not leaving hair behind to enter the art world. She is bringing every strand, every year of knowledge and every unstable version of the self with her. The work is getting larger. The room will have to move around it.
This feature was developed with artist-provided biographical material and statements from Shannon Romano. Artwork and imagery courtesy of Shannon Romano / PIGMENT.
