Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists

At the gallery, Bedgood traced her interest in hair back to Victorian mourning traditions. In the nineteenth century, locks of hair were preserved in lockets, jewelry, wreaths, and corsage-like memorial objects. Family members might contribute hair after a death, and that hair could be worked into tatting, lace, and elaborate commemorative forms. These objects were intimate memorials, handmade records of loss. They were also strange. Hair carries that double charge. It can be beautiful and creepy, sentimental and bodily, sacred and unsettling, private and political, all at once.

Bedgood understands that charge. Hair has long been tied to memory, grief, family, childhood, femininity, religious imagery, cultural identity, illness, and shame. People save a baby’s first haircut. They keep a lover’s hair in a locket. They preserve hair after someone dies. At the same time, hair can be used as a tool of control or humiliation. Forced head-shaving has been used as punishment in wartime, under authoritarian regimes, and as a public act of shame. Illness changes the meaning again. Alopecia and chemotherapy make the loss of hair visible, vulnerable, and sometimes unexpectedly powerful.

That range of meanings gives the hair works in Vestiges of Existence their emotional force. Hair is not decoration here. It is evidence, relic, witness, and emotional material. It belongs to the body, to family, to mourning, to beauty, to fear, and to history. It can suggest tenderness in one moment and violence in the next.

Some of these works began after Bedgood spent time abroad, where she became deeply affected by the history of Germany, World War II, the Holocaust, and the way sites of violence can later be absorbed into ordinary public life. She spoke about encountering a community garden that had once been the site of a pogrom and massacre. What does it mean for a place of killing to become a garden? What remains in the soil? What does a tree witness? What does the sky remember?

That experience led Bedgood to think about nature as witness: trees, earth, night, stars, and constellations silently holding the memory of what happened there. In several works, the act of looking upward becomes important. One piece is titled North Star. The image of the night sky suggests direction, survival, orientation, and perhaps the last thing one might see when looking up. The ground may hold violence, but the sky still offers a point of reference.

The darkness in these works is real, but Bedgood does not want the work to remain only in grief or horror. She spoke of wanting light to come through. That is important. These works are not illustrations of trauma. They are acts of processing, looking, remembering, and transforming. They hold the complicated beauty that can emerge from memory without pretending the wound is gone.

In speaking about Germany, Bedgood also described how travel forced her to reconsider what she thought she knew about European history, the Berlin Wall, postwar divisions, and the lingering presence of violence in the landscape. Like many Americans, she realized how little of that history had truly been taught. The works grow out of that mixture of historical research, personal reflection, museum visits, sketching, memory, and material experimentation.

That sense of witness also deepens a work such as Loss: Brahma Jumper Child’s Toy, 2026. The image of the toy is quiet, almost ghosted into the surface, but it carries the shock of recognition. A child’s toy is never only a toy once it has been touched, dragged, slept beside, forgotten, or lost. It belongs to play, but it also belongs to memory. In Bedgood’s hands, it becomes another fragile survivor, another object that seems to ask why some things remain visible while others disappear.

The same question runs through Food Insecurity: Starvation, 2026. Here Bedgood’s attention turns toward the material reality of need. Hunger is not an abstraction. It is bodily, political, historical, and present. The work’s surface is worn and gray, with language almost buried beneath the image, as though the words themselves have been scraped, weathered, or starved of certainty. Like many of the works in the exhibition, it holds together image and evidence, public condition and private vulnerability.

What makes Bedgood’s work so quietly powerful is that she does not separate these registers. Family memory, historical violence, devotional time, natural decay, illness, hunger, mourning, and beauty are not treated as separate subjects. They overlap. They cling to one another. A flower can become a body. A caliper can become a measure of inheritance. A book can become a reliquary. A toy can become a witness. Hair can become a record of presence.

Seen this way, Barnacles of Existence and Vestiges of Existence are not isolated exhibitions, but parts of a long conversation. Barnacles asked what objects cling to us. Vestiges asks what remains after we are gone. Both bodies of work are rooted in the same understanding: that ordinary things are never merely ordinary once they have passed through human life.