Modder created that first work, “Portrait in Quarantine” before she started grad school. Then in grad school, she looked at it and thought, “Well, what’s next? What comes after this image?” Thus the series “Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks”—up through Sunday, Feb. 23 in Largo—was born.
She refers to that first image as a herald—a sign that something interesting is about to happen. The herald plays an important role in the “Hero’s Journey,” a timeless storytelling structure Modder used as inspiration for the art that is now on display at Creative Pinellas.
“That’s the strange moment that pulls my character into her world,” Modder told CL. “When she grows a person out of her hair.”
Modder pulls viewers into her story with a few lines of text at the exhibition’s start: “On a Monday morning in Massachusetts, a Black woman awoke to find that she had grown a person out of her hair…”
Then the hair person is like, ‘This world sucks. Why don’t you just go to your own world where it’s just you and whatever you bring in?’” she summarizes. “It’s in the morning, so she’s wearing her pajamas, this big oversized dress and her striped socks. And she decides to go in what she’s wearing. That’s when the story begins.”
And now, through Feb. 23, you can walk through that story at Creative Pinellas.
“The idea is that you feel a bit immersed in the story,” says Modder. “Maybe it towers above you.”
The larger-than-life-size works serve as a throwback to childhood, when everything and everyone was so much bigger than you were, and your parents read you fairy tales by Dr. Seuss.
“You kind of have to discover it as you’re walking through, but it’s an immersive fairy tale,” Modder told CL.
Why present these works in fairy tale format?
“I think fairy tales are fascinating,” Modder told CL. “They’re appealing. I feel like they have universal appeal. And I think a lot of the stuff that I like to think and talk about is quite sad. When you think about overconsumption or just all of these different issues, they can be a bit more approachable as a fairy tale or allegory as opposed to tackling these issues head on.”
“Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks” tackles consumerism, greed, status and oppression through the collection of socks.
“Everyone has two socks,” Modder tells it. “All the duplicates have two socks. But some of the characters want more socks. They want to collect all the socks to make cool things. And you have the Wearer of All Socks, the top of the hierarchy. She’s got this huge sock dress that’s just pooling on the floor.”
That’s just one story.
Modder’s tales take the form of nine murals at Creative Pinellas. It’s the largest showing of her “Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks” series to date.
“Usually, you just see maybe one storyline,” Modder told CL. “But at Creative Pinellas, there’s three or four different tangents or storylines you can follow.”
In the writing world, the four-year project would be a novel. “Each of these stories is like chapters, but it’s all the same world,” says Modder.
It’s an ongoing story for Modder, who explored the idea of creating more scenic, landscape-style works at Creative Pinellas.
“’Mountain of Rest’ is kind of reminiscent of those great American landscape paintings with huge mountains and scenic water and tiny little characters looking out in this great landscape,” Modder told CL. “So it kind of looks like that, but it’s just built out of people and hair and socks.”
Modder’s story is told in nine murals, or scenes, at Creative Pinellas: The Wearer of All Socks, The Sock Factory, The Attack of the Hair Monster, The Source of All Hair, A Field of Lost Hair Ties, Mountain of Rest, Sock Hero, Her Hair Like the Sun and Clouds and the war towers.
“Once I hit this storyline, there was just a lot for me to explore, and it hasn’t dried up yet,” Modder told CL.
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This article appears in Jan 23-29, 2025.