Hair Peace (Battersea Arts Centre)

Performance artist Victoria Melody turns her own life into art. In her show Major Tom she went on a pilgrimage, accompanied by her massive Basset Hound, to become a beauty queen. Her most recent piece, arriving at Battersea Arts Centre after a UK tour, follows on from Major Tom. It was inspired by the fact that her hairdresser, tasked with making Melody’s hair competition-ready, had absolutely no idea who originally owned the hair in the lengthy, lusty extensions she was in the process of gluing to Melody’s bonce.

Melody, driven by the idea that hair is actually a body part, rather than an hair accessory as it is currently classed for trading, decided to find the real people behind the hair she had had weaved into her own mop. In this short, sweet piece, she gives a kind of dramatised lecture on how she discovered who might have sold their hair and why.

Her extensions came in three pony tails, one from Russia, one from India and the third’s origins were unknown. We see video footage of her flying off to India, where she meets Neeharika, a young woman who shows Melody the practise of Tonsuring – shaving your head for religious reasons. She then heads to Russia to meet a hair salesman and uncovers a little of the underworld of hair buying and selling. At one point a woman turns up with her dead mother’s hair and is offered £5 for it. In the UK, hairdressers buy Russian extensions for a lot more than that.

Though Melody makes Hair Peace engrossing and engaging – and frequently very funny – there’s not a huge amount of drama here. There are some poignant moments, not least the scene where Melody’s extension obsessed cousin meets Neeharika over Skype. Melody’s cousin hadn’t ever considered who her lovely new locks had originally belonged to.

And that is the simple, delicately made point of Hair Peace. Rather than shine a light on any questionable practises in the hair trade (which Melody points to, but doesn't fully expose), Melody's main focus is to make us think a little more about what we are buying, where it came from and how it got to us. It’s a point carefully made at the end, but it felt like a vague way of addressing an important issue. I wanted a little more guts from the piece which had some lovely highlights, but needed a bit more work at its roots.

Hair Peace runs at Battersea Arts Centre until 25 June.