Dolls: Why? I don’t know. But they are dolls, that’s the name that our history has come up with—a way to call something that looks like a female but 1/8 the size and not alive. . . So many forms: corn cob, fabric, puppets, marionettes (puppet master—why do we want to do a thing like that?) a doll of a twig, or plaster, moving dynamically, pulled to zero velocity—and, these dolls, the ones I make, are a certain thing. For some, they are not important, for others, they are special objects. The latter are the people who buy the dolls. They see her, they want her, they have to be with her. Have to have her be with them.
Imagination was a large contributor to my primitive childhood. Surrounded with blocks and pencils and paints and all of those games that you accrue during the duration, the babies held a more primordial reality suspension for me. Children always play what they imagine adult life to be (Fischer Price cash register, anyone? I didn’t have one, but god what I wouldn’t have given--perhaps as many as five (5) red coin shaped pieces of plastic- so real!), and for me, taking care of the plastic babies seemed important. We had a game where we went around rescuing children from unpleasant circumstances and using toilet paper to cast and recast their broken limbs.
And, memorably, I was once trying to make half a living selling these at craft shows, and I was going to college and living on the cheap so I spent some time making the ancestors of what I make now, and one night at about 12 AM, I had finished yet another doll. I sat back and stretched and looked at the fruit of my labor; row upon row of shiny pretty dollies! All staring at me from between the gaps in the weave of the muslin—an ARMY OF BEAUTIES! My minions!
And anyway, my point is that I love it that sometimes people really love these gals. That is neat—it makes me feel like a hippie. That they are assembled and weigh something, and that they are aesthetically interesting makes them an exceedingly easy pleasure to enjoy for people who are susceptible to sensory information, which we all crave to some degree. But really, type q people don’t givem a second look, type p people drag their whole shopping party down because they just have to look closer.
These, incidentally, are arms and bodies. Hanging out.
Imagination was a large contributor to my primitive childhood. Surrounded with blocks and pencils and paints and all of those games that you accrue during the duration, the babies held a more primordial reality suspension for me. Children always play what they imagine adult life to be (Fischer Price cash register, anyone? I didn’t have one, but god what I wouldn’t have given--perhaps as many as five (5) red coin shaped pieces of plastic- so real!), and for me, taking care of the plastic babies seemed important. We had a game where we went around rescuing children from unpleasant circumstances and using toilet paper to cast and recast their broken limbs.
And, memorably, I was once trying to make half a living selling these at craft shows, and I was going to college and living on the cheap so I spent some time making the ancestors of what I make now, and one night at about 12 AM, I had finished yet another doll. I sat back and stretched and looked at the fruit of my labor; row upon row of shiny pretty dollies! All staring at me from between the gaps in the weave of the muslin—an ARMY OF BEAUTIES! My minions!
And anyway, my point is that I love it that sometimes people really love these gals. That is neat—it makes me feel like a hippie. That they are assembled and weigh something, and that they are aesthetically interesting makes them an exceedingly easy pleasure to enjoy for people who are susceptible to sensory information, which we all crave to some degree. But really, type q people don’t givem a second look, type p people drag their whole shopping party down because they just have to look closer.
These, incidentally, are arms and bodies. Hanging out.
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