Before venturing into blizzard conditions for our beach destination photoshoot to feature Marin’s work, we sat down at Veselka to enjoy some warm Ukrainian soul food. Over some steaming bowls of borscht and, of course, homemade perogies, we dove into Marin’s origin story, what drew her into the creative realm, and, more specifically, hair as a medium.

Emerging from her youth,  engulfed in Tumblr culture, MTV music videos, and a healthy Fall Out Boy obsession -- she would go on to evolve from traditional salon work to exploring more artistic avenues, including editorial/runway, set design, and hair sculpture. We dive into what Marin calls the ‘mystic’ of hair: the personal and cultural significance it carries, the challenges of working in the fashion industry, and the importance of maintaining mental health while pursuing creative careers.

On the eve of the photo shoot, we piled into the car and headed to Ventnor City, New Jersey, in search of an empty and picturesque beach and (attempted) to make the 6 a.m. wake-up call for a sunrise shoot. Early in the morning, Marin worked tirelessly to assemble her hand-knotted, hand-braided yarn sculpture on top of the models piece by piece, eventually conjoining them by their ‘hair.’ Miranda Katello and Ty Fierce Metteba exuded beauty and grace, exploring the sort of independent togetherness that is necessary to move when you’re literally bound to another human being. By wearing her hair sculpture, the models navigated and embodied the invisible cords of relationships.

Ultimately, our conversation with Marin mirrored the images created. Emphasizing the value of collaboration, the need for safety in creative work, and the ongoing journey of balancing artistic passion with practical considerations, Marin highlights the transformative power of hair in personal identity and the importance of community within the creative process.

Q: Let’s start with your origin story. In terms of creative expression with hair-- you're not just doing blowouts at a hair salon, you’ve really carved out your own lane. So, how did you start playing with hair? How does that align with your own creative language, your je ne sais quoi?

A: Growing up, I always really loved fashion. Initially, as a kid, I had a background in performing arts. It wasn't something that I really followed through with my adulthood, but probably around the end of middle school, I decided that I really liked beauty and hair. I had a childhood boyfriend at the time, whose mom was a hairdresser, and we were very close. I spent a lot of time with their family, and I just thought she was the coolest person ever. He also had a sister who did hair, and I thought she was the second coolest person ever. I let myself be enveloped in their world, and I would say they were the source of my inspiration for wanting to be in the hair world.

I’d been obsessed with MySpace. Then, the internet got more expansive and Tumblr came about. I was more exposed to fashion images, and I just really fell in love with it. It’s also important to note that I've always been obsessed with music videos and the curation of worlds. I think tangibly hair became my entry point into that, or the medium with which I found myself being able to keep that kind of a thing. I've also always been really obsessed with my own hair. I'm very particular about my haircuts, and straightening my hair, and those kinds of things. I think I've always just had a fixation.

Q: Ok, so we missed some amazing quotes when we were just chatting off the record about throwing your Target brand bra at a scene drummer, but could you say more about these worlds? What's scratching the itch? What subsets of culture or bands or references are building this for you?

A: I grew up being really obsessed with Fall Out Boy. That was like my obsession from grade school until even now. They're still in my rotation. I have a distinct memory of waiting up all night (this is before YouTube and before even having like a household computer) for the music video for “Sugar We're Goin Down” to come on TV because I needed to watch it. And it didn't come on. I stayed up all night for nothing. But those kinds of things really satisfied me. Even now, I still look to music videos as my main source of ispiration, and scene culture was a big part of my life growing up.  

Even to this day when I'm searching for inspiration, I think back to my younger self and the kind of things that I was obsessed with back then. And it still serves as a source of excitement for me. When I struggle to find this, it brings back a sense of relevancy to why I want to do the things that I do. Because, you know, like you said, I'm not just in a salon. I'm not just like doing blowouts. And I like doing those things. But I have always loved music videos because they've given a strong sense of a distinct world. And in my work, I strive to do just that.
Q: How do you describe what you do to somebody who has, like, no context of this?

A: It's funny because I feel like there's a little bit of everything involved in what I do, I mean, in a general sense, I just tell people, yeah, I'm a hairstylist. I do a mix of set work and independent clients that’s such a brief description of what this life really entails. I think my understanding and relationships with what I do is always changing. In ways, my interests expand also beyond everything right now, what other mediums I can  access this world through, which is how I started getting into  the mix of art. But yeah, I feel like everyone back home, just in my life, like they know that I travel all over the place and always around these interesting people and it's hard to package what I do in one way. I've been really blessed to do a lot of different things here.

Q: How do you feel like it fits within the arts context? You're coming into a cool avenue. I mean, there's not really a canon of hair in galleries, but you're coming into this space from a really free perspective. You’re presenting art very differently than somebody who's a traditional painter–  do you feel any freedoms or challenges?

A: Exactly. Yeah, I think it's good. My interests are always shifting, and I’m always searching for how I can incorporate those things and bring them back to the hair world in some way. From a very practical sense, hair is how I support myself. It's how I pay my bills. I do as much as I can do to make that creative.  I have to approach it more practically to some extent, but I really enjoy the moments where I can be a little more expansive, a bit like the hair sculpture. When I first moved to New York, I spent a lot of time around hair artist Dennis Lanni, and he is very much like, in my opinion, the true pioneer of hair as hardware. He has like an amazing body of work of hair in conjunction with found material. I'm super inspired by him. Dennis is truly a legend.

He really expanded my understanding of what hair can be, it's potential, even down to yarn and hair. The first thing I ever did with Dennis involved intertwining dark hair and I attribute that fully to him. He opened my mind -- So an awake day. So sick. Yeah, so thank you Dennis!


Q: Hair is so hyper-personal. You see the girls after their breakup switch it up. There's so many ancient lineages of hair traditions and like sacred knowledge surounding people's hair. What is your relationship to the mystique of hair?

A: Every time I do someone's hair, I realize that it's a deeply personal experience. Another thing I've learned throughout my time is the importance of lowering your ego. Hair has more potential when you take some of that ego away, for both parties. But from, like, a client to service provider, it's personal.

People's haircuts mean a lot to them. When you think about the history of hair and the and the ancestral importance. How different people and cultures spend years growing it for various reasons. And then when it's cut off, it's symbolic of a removal of energy. So I always think it's really interesting how the different people and cultures attribute hair to a ‘holding onto’ of experience.

I think it's fascinating because there's some people that don't give a thought about their hair. They’re like: Just cut it off, just fry it, don't care if it falls out. Then, there are people who are passionate about it. Right? It's interesting to see how that varies from person to person.

It's like a very different experience for every moment because I get my hair done too! I was super passionate about my hair growing up, like a bad haircut would ruin me. I was very particular about how I wanted my hair to be. A lot of my frustration as a young preteen was not getting my hair cut the way she wanted it to be cut. Because it was intertwined with my identity at that point... and it still is.

I would like to go to school with soaking wet hair because I love how straight my hair looks when it’s wet and my mom would get so mad because I'd have two wet spots on my shirt. But I was just obsessed with really specific things like that where I would wear giant headbands that covered my whole forehead. I had my own strange little hair obsession growing up.Q: I'm curious to hear about the fashion industry and your relationships within that. Even when you’re just doing somebody else's hair, you're never doing a job solo. Even if you're the only one practicing, there's another human in the chair with you. Then, often you work as part of a team, collaborating with others your own vision, or helping somebody else's vision come to life. How do these dynamics feel?

A: Depending on where I am mentally at any point in time, my relationship to the fashion industry is ever changing. At the end of the day, it's a career and sometimes it's hard to conceptualize that my ability to support myself relies on succeeding in a space where there's not only one way to do things. On set, for example, there's a lot of checkpoints: there's a stylist, a photographer, the client, if you're working with a brand and even the talent themselves depending on how much say they have. And that can either be exhilarating or suffocating. When I’m in a good headspace, I find myself able to rise to that occasion. It's exciting to acquire different skills and tools to navigate that. Then, there’s moments where that's more daunting.

In the context of a more free and loose situation, I really enjoy a collaborative process. I like having a certain amount of space and flexibility to bring my own eye to the table. But there's also times where I don't have an idea and I get inspired by getting a jumping point or a reference. And then there are times when I have an idea and I want to involve all these people that I think are really amazing for me to bring it to life.Q: Do you have any tips or tricks for people working in a collaborative way?

A: Again, it comes back to ego. I mean, as artists, we all have it. Right. But I think it really opens up the soul of your collaboration. You can put some of your ego down, it just makes you more open and receptive. I think other people can sense how much of that is present to you. So I think, in turn, if you come into it open in that way, it allows others to be open in return. So that's how I like to approach that. 

I've had experiences where, like, I'll do someone's color or other cuts, and I see them just kind of transform. I did a client the other day who's a mom. We do her color and see her, come to life in a different way, like wow. It’s really rewarding, and it's just a good reminder of how much changing someone's hair can bring them back to themselves or bring them to a different version of themselves that they may never have tried.

I needed that physical change. That, in turn, does generate mental change and connection. You go through a transformative experience with somebody, and you're kind of conducting it and still collaborating with them. And you inevitably bond over that, you know? It's like they feel a connection to you for being able to do this for them, and you feel a connection to them for letting you, for inviting you. And that that’s the [connective] thread you know, to generate that.Q: We were talking about how the creative path is very unique. One person’s path will look totally different than another. So I’m curious, how are you structuring this for yourself? What are you calling it at this point?

A: Right now I'm spending a lot of time thinking out exactly what my next steps are and thinking about what kind of career I want to have, what I want it to look like. I tend to want to mix different things and never really look just one way. Utimately, I create  worlds and play within them. For me, the most rewarding thing with my video work and art installations is $building a world. The goal is to continue to integrate all my interests as cohesivley as I can.

But, in a lot of ways I am kind of just vibing. I'm trying to strike a balance between letting life happen and also being intentional. In a general sense, just trying to support myself and get by financially and materialistically. But, for me, right now, success looks like just being able to exist comfortably and support myself while having the space and time to figure out what I want to do, how I want to do it, what do I want my future to look like. Because I sometimes, I don't know, I truly don't. But I kind of like that I don't know right now. That's really beautiful.

I'm always going to be passionate about the art of music video because it was really my introduction into this world. I formed such an emotional connection to all those videos that I’ve loved throughout my life.

Yeah, like TRL was everything, MTV was everything, I just feel like my mom was always so chill about whatever I watched. But, my grandmom, I lived with my grandmom, she didn't even love me watching MTV, so I would have MTV on and then hit the last button, so like Nickelodeon would be playing.





Q: I feel like all creatives go through this thing, especially in our capitalist society, where it's like, okay this is my passion, and now it's my career. How do you stay true to the spark that inspired you?

A: Great question because it really encapsulates where I've been at mentally in relation to my career -- I'm sort of battling this idea of like I need to do this to survive and like exist in this world that, you know, implements a lot of economic pressure and I think unfortunately in New York, we don’t live in a society that's conducive to creating [economically]. Doing hair and supporting myself in hair allows me to have the space to create and it’s opened doors to me to connect with other creatives that I can bring in for other creative ventures that like don't always involve hair -- as much as I love doing hair.

Again I think my relationship to everything is such a product of where I am mentally and I cycle through a hundred different states of mind. So, my relationship to my career is like ever changing in time. Ultimately I'll always be really thankful to hair and to this industry because it's allowed me to like live in a city I've always wanted to live in and share/develop a lot of relationships.





Q: You seem to be pretty in tune on this like mental health journey. But I think there is such a yo-yo ego with creating and with these kind of unstable careers and especially when you're not getting a consisent income, it's stressful. There’s these up and downs of finances and also these up and downs of creative attitude from: “I just killed this, I feel amazing!” to “Oh, I hate that look,” back to “Oh, this is great.”

Could you speak to that? Do you have any like practices or words of advice for other hustlers getting creative out there?

A: For me personally, I've struggled with mental health. I think learning how to take care of myself again and actually take my time to take care of myself is so important. I'm in a space where I'm trying to adhere to and prioritize taking care of myself again, because I was in a spot where I was feeling a little like nihilistic and like what's the point?

My friend made a good point in that to create, there needs to be an element of safety. And I think that when that safety feels constantly threatened by like economic pressures (and maybe at varying times there's like a scarcity of work) it's hard to create because the needs to do things to support yourself overshadows that safety and that freedom to just do whatever. You know it's like they say artists need time to do nothing and I think that that's like very true. That's why right now I feel like I'm in a place where I'm okay with just like letting life happen to me a little bit. So being intentional works, but I used to put a lot of pressure on myself to always have a directive and like have next steps laid out. I've let it really stifle my creativity. So I'm trying to go on this journey where I'm seeing what this mindset of just kind of being a little less strict in that way will keep me creative.

With struggling a lot mentally throughout my lifetime, it's equal parts informed a lot of my work and been a source of inspiration in ways. But in recent times it's actually impaired a lot of my creative process. In the creative community we tend to think that we need to experience a lot of pain. I think that pain can produce good art. There's times where I'm really inspired by my pain, and there's, like, other times where it's just too heavy to move in. I've learned that there comes a point where getting help is a really important thing if it's necessary. Yeah, I think mental health is ongoing. Forever.

My biggest lesson that I've learned lately is that safety really can breed good art, and it's something that gets overlooked a lot, because there's not a lot of safety in creative careers, which don't guarantee anything. Sometimes you have to resort to things that are completely unrelated to your creative passion, just to achieve that safety, and that can either be inspiring or distacting to people, but yeah, right now I'm really just striving for safety.