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!