When I was younger, I drew and painted a lot. The motives of my artworks were often morbid, bloody, in depth and in touch with my own feelings about growing up in Norway, where I struggled to fit in, where I felt that everything is about money and how you present yourself. I often heard from my parents or others, “can you just make some normal art?” And I tried, I tried really hard. But I always found it wasn’t fitting me.

During my Product Design studies in the Netherlands, the summer before I started my final graduation year, we had to present our project’s ideas. I knew I wanted to do something with the human body as material, and I decided on working with human hair because I found it to be the best material to work with. It’s also very available and it’s a durable textile. I had done some sewing tests with human hair and it worked well. I was super excited to present my project. But then the teachers just stared at me, and didn’t say much. I heard a bit of laughter, like snickering. The feedback wasn’t great – they thought I was way out there, they told me that the project wasn’t viable. They basically laughed at me while I was standing there in the room. 

I remember thinking a lot about whether I should continue or not, because it would be a really, really difficult year if they were not on board now, and I didn’t know how to convince them. I decided to pursue a different project, focused on shoes.

The following year was very challenging. It included a lot of mental breakdowns and I felt myself wanting to quit. I even started seeing a psychologist. She basically just said to me, “you just got to continue doing it. You’ll be happy in the end. Grades – they don’t matter. Just manage to pass and get out, and then you can do whatever you want in the future without teachers doubting you because they have a different vision of design.”.

I eventually gave up on the shoes and graduated with my project on human hair textiles – and the feedback was great. Now nobody was laughing. They were all very proud. I proved them wrong. And I feel that was my motivation the whole time – to prove them wrong. There’s this quote by Mary Oxman, “if you feel alone in design, you know you’re doing something right.” I had that quote on my wall in my studio the whole time, and I thought to myself, “I know this is the right path, because no one really understands what I’m doing and I’m meeting so much resistance.”

And through the project I’ve met quite a lot of other people that are working with human hair as a material and we’re forming a group of people working with that. Hopefully that will also inspire more young people to be aware and open about design and not be scared to challenge the norms. The journey is super hard, but the results are so giving. It feels amazing when you actually accomplish something, and people will doubt you for the whole process but when it is finished, they will say “Wow, this is amazing.” Then they will say that they never doubted you. But they did.