In 1993, Sonia Boyce began creating a series of objects from cut hair, such as Three Legs of Tights Stuffed with Hair (1994), commenting: "when I was producing them, I was thinking that they were disgusting". Cut hair is already likened to decapitation or the loss of part of one's body. The question of abjection and transgressive bodies, allows us to rethink and rewrite the status of representations of black females resulting from the era of slavery and continuing throughout colonial history.

Here the abject is not just a representation of the body but is the spectre of a historic malaise, a shameful memory that also informs collective memory.

De-categorisation and sacrifice induces both a reflection on the eroticised black body but also on the (effaced) social body of the black female artist in Britain.

- Sophie Orlando, "Sonia Boyce: sound, tension and the sacred" in Scat - Sonia Boyce: Sound and Collaboration, Iniva, 2013)