Dolls and Death

I don't think of myself as a morbid person, but I have to admit to being attracted to things with a whiff of Goth. When I create  I don't use new equipment, tools, or materials if I can help it.  Even when fresh out of the studio, my dolls look shopworn. Perhaps I'm channeling the zeitgeist:  that fin de siecle sort of feeling that's prevalent during "tough economic times"--a phrase I'm getting awfully tired of hearing, and am a bit ashamed to use.  On the other hand, my dolls are also channeling that "use up, make do, recycle" mentality that's not Goth but Green.

So many of my dolls are made of parts of old hats or lace hankies that I've gleaned from junk stores.  I think sometimes of the  ladies who wore those hats and tucked those hankerchiefs into their sleeves, like my grandmother did.  Those hats and laces all rotten now, untouched and falling apart.  Would those bygone ladies be scandalized to see their accessories incorporated into a doll?  I hope they'd laugh and be happy that something they'd worn, that was a projection of their sense of style and self,  has undergone a metamorphosis.  As they have done, dear dead ladies.  In life they collected pretty things, and now that they're gone, and their pretty things scattered to the winds,  they're  providers of my workshop. 

I've included a picture of a doll made of an old grammar book.  She's wearing a bow from a hat I found in a store in Walnut Cove.  When I bought the hat the store owner said it once belonged to an elderly lady who wore a different hat every day, even into her 90's.

Guys and Dolls

Something I've noticed since I began making my "poppets" or mixed-media figures, or dolls--whatever their identity may be.
Women like them.  Men don't.  Almost all who have bought a doll from me have been women.

Note that my own dear husband implies on my Facebook page that my little newborn horse-human is "wicked."
At school, the male professors shy away from my figures; the women crowd around and ask all kinds of questions.  The French professor (a male) actually said there was something evil about them!

What's up with that?  Are men intimidated by the elements of abjection, of decay, that I use to compose these creations?  The rust, the dirt, the smudged faces and aged patinas?  Does this mean that women are more comfortable with abjection and fragmentation than men?

I'll  pursue this further.  Right now I have a doll I'm making out of an old book, and she's giving me a devil of a time deciding whether she's going to stand upright.  ARMATURE, I keep telling myself.  ARMATURE!

Some Days You Get Rusty Bottle Caps

So today Kate and I went searching for rusty washers in the gutters around Liberty Street and Third Street, but first we stopped in to look for glass skull beads in Julie Knabb's bead gallery (textures@bellsouth.net) .  Julie's place is down the alley between 6th and Vine Restaurant  and my friend Millicent's Urban Artware, so going into her place is like finding a wonderful secret hideout.  Julie spoke so enthusiastically about her current work and said that somewhere in her stash she might be able to find some little hands and feet for dolls.  Good to know!  And her beaded Yoruba armchair is to die for.  Millicent in Urban Artware was busy setting up the SEED display (I really need to ask her about SEED sometime soon; my information on SEED is a little fuzzy).  She liked Kate's "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" tee-shirt.  There's a wonderful harpy in Urban Artware with a pottery face and textile body. 

Not a single rusty washer did we see, anywhere, in any gutter.
By that time we were hot and thirsty and drove over to Third Street to Krankie's Coffee for something cold.  Krankie's seemed full of professors from Wake Forest, so I challenged Kate to look around and see if she could tell the philosophy professors from the physics profs.  We both agreed that while a math professor gives off a definite vibe, it's harder to tell the difference between philosophy and English. As an English teacher I can assert that I give off a most obvious English teacher aura.
I was disappointed that we hadn't found any washers--but lo and behold, the gravel parking lot of Krankie's proved to be a veritable treasure trove of rusty bottle caps!  I even took a photo of Kate pointing at one.  Krankie's was displaying some of the work of tattooer Matt Hoyme.  If I liked the thought of tattoos affixed to my flesh, I might have been interested in calling him up.  He does beautiful carp.

The day's take:  7 rusty bottle caps, a grotty railroad spike, the pleasure of Kate's company, seeing some fun art, and meeting Julie Knabb and acquiring 10 of her glass skull beads.  We'd have searched for more bottle caps if it hadn't been so ferociously hot.  That part of town--down on the traintracks near Krankie's off Third Street--was almost surreally deserted.

So!  The Rust Gods weren't generous with washers, but we got a fair collection of bottle caps.  I'm satisfied.

101 Uses for Rusty Washers

Until I started taking an interest in free art material just waiting to be picked up out of the gutter, I never realized how many rusty washers there are in the world.  I love that patina so much that I looked up how to achieve a fake rusty appearance, using this rather frighteningly toxic brew that should only be mixed outdoors in a mask.  It works, but nothing beats a piece of metal that's been lying in the gutter.


Metal washers remind me of all sorts of things:  miniature millstones, jade buttons, money from the Island of Yap, wombs, universes.  (I teach symbolic analysis, remember!)  What's fun is to see how many doll parts you can make out of rusty washers.


Tomorrow my friend Kate-across-the street and I are going downtown to look for rusty washers, and if we can't find any we'll try to find rusty flattened bottle caps.  They can work just as well.  Sometimes.  A lot of potential and mystery lies in what's missing--the hole.  We'll see how many we can find and what sort of poppet parts we can use them for.  Perhaps Kate-across-the-street can show me how to transfer pictures of what we make to this blog.

What Do I Do With All This Stuff?

I teach at the UNC-School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina--as a Humanities professor, not an arts teacher--but being around art students every day has rubbed off, because I spend a lot of time making dolls and little houses out of old found objects and tattered books.  Some materials I've found in the gutter on my way to school; some I've found in junk stores, or in the throw-away bins at book sales; some I've found in my grandmother's attic.

One friend saves all her chewing-gum wrappers for me.  They make wonderful iridescent scales for mermaids.


I've been making these items for about four years, ever since my father died and I inherited the contents of his workshop.  I looked around and asked myself, "What am I gonna do with all this stuff?"  I couldn't bear to let it go, so I started finding ways of using it.   Once I began combining the rusty things in his toolshed with old rotten books and bits of linen and discolored lace I unearthed in various junk shops, the dolls began to jell.  At first I called them poppets, then dolls, and now I suppose they've morphed into "mixed-media three-dimensional figures."  The angrier, edgier ones are for sale at Urban Artware on Trade Street here in W-S, and the more bookish ones are at an independent bookstore on Burke Street, Barnhill's Books.  Some stay at home with me.


It occurs to me that other people might like to chat about making mixed-media poppets, and might like to
share tips on the world of the self-taught artist.  And storage.  How do you handle storage?!  As soon as I become a more proficient blogger, I'll post pictures of the pieces I'm working on.  I always appreciate feedback, and can promise never to get huffy.