Kanekalon hair, the synthetic fiber of braiding salons and everyday hair care, is the raw material of Your Birth is My Birth, a speculative universe currently taking over Jane Lombard Gallery through June 13th. Artists Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez have spent nearly a decade building Hairland, a collaborative fictional ecosystem that began with large-scale tassel sculptures in a Phoenix nonprofit space and has grown into a fully realized botanical mythology.

The exhibition transforms the gallery into a conservatory of invented species featured in five bodies of work: Listening Roots, Hearing Bells, Mother & Child, Stacking Pearls, and Umbra Pods, each with its own life cycle and place within a web of mutual dependence. The starting point is the epiphyte, a plant that grows on other plants without harming them, a model for thinking about care, growth, and connection that runs through the work at every scale. The title is borrowed from a phrase two friends exchange in the television series I May Destroy You, in good times and hard ones alike. We spoke with Alaka and Frésquez about how Hairland began, how they build together, and what draws them to worlds that don’t exist yet.