It’s been a while, but I’m back and it’s show and tell time, people! Here’s how it works: I’m going to talk to you about my new show “Shrouded Mirrors‚” and you – I mean YOU, are going to respond by commenting or emailing about your doll/art/doll art exploits. The most interesting/accomplished/just plain awesome of you will be featured in a future post. So respond, the power is yours!

Ok, I guess I’ll start with the ‚”Hey, cool, look what I can do a bit. As some of you know, I’m an artist, the dime-a-dozen painting-and-drawing type. But there is something that I do that is considered by some in my field as ‚”awesome” ‚”creepy” or ‚”umm…unique‚” As you’ve probably guessed by the tone of this blog, I make dolls.

It started as an exercise in grief after my great aunt died. She had been obsessed with dolls in a really weird way and after she passed I started to make them in rememberance of her. It was hard to do at first. I had to swallow my disgust because previously I had been more than a little creeped out by dolls. (probably because of my great aunt, but that is another story for another time.) Due to being the typical self-hating artist I muscled through the gag reflex and found out that I *gasp* liked making dolls. I found that there were things that I could say through dolls that I couldn’t say in any other media. An obsession was born.

And I have carried that obsession through to this latest show, “Shrouded Mirrors”, my second solo show at the Peacock Room lounge in Orlando Florida. This work is definitely my best to date and I am especially proud of the four crown jewels of the show: my recently completed ball-jointed dolls. The dolls are sculpted from imported stone-clay over a 4 month period and then finished with oil paints and powdered pigments. It took a lot of trial and error, the dolls that you see here are version 2.0, and I really feel happy with the outcome. As well as the dolls themselves, there are a few 2D pieces with doll themes. “She Sleeps with Eyes Open” is a drawing of Snow White as an unsleeping ball-jointed doll in a coffin full of apples. In “The Poetry of Rot” a doll head covered in twigs, poisonous mushrooms and creepy crawlies hurtles across the picture plane. There is also a subtle doll reference in “Jardin d’Hiver”, an oil painting on the theme of immaturity. A doll’s ball-jointed hand offers the main figure a tantalizing piece of forbidden fruit.

I hope that you have enjoyed this short tour of my cobwebed and doll-infested imagination. If you are in the Orlando Florida area, please come see “Shrouded Mirrors” at the Peacock Room. It will be up through Halloween.

I look forward to seeing your personal your offerings to the doll world!

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