NIADA Gallery
NIADA is an international organization of artists and patrons dedicated to the art of the contemporary doll
MessageI’ve been sculpting, drawing and sewing since childhood and have pursued art-making all my life. For more than 30 years I’ve explored the anthropomorphic genre of figurative sculpture and was elected into NIADA Artist membership in 1996. At the heart of my daily practice is an abiding sense of sustainability—a commitment to using natural, archival materials. My dolls are constructed like antique china dolls, with heads, hands and feet or shoes directly sculpted from high-fire porcelain or stoneware clay, pigmented with high-fire ceramic stains, then fired in a kiln and finally sealed in pure beeswax. (I have lately been exploring a similar process using air-drying clays painted with watercolors and sealed in beeswax.) They are then sewn onto an armatured or articulated cloth body. The costume is usually integrated into the doll’s body design.
Vintage fabrics and linens beyond restoration are the mainstay of my fabric stash and costuming impulses. Every component of a piece informs my process, and often a nuance of personality will arise out of the fabric remnant itself or from a button, buckle or bit of lace—my subtler way of doting on both the planet and the palpably silent past of such storied objects.
A decade lived in New York City (2007-2017) provided opportunities to explore the processes of fine art printmaking and curation, as well as stop-motion animation, and further stoked an internal drive towards creating my own impossibly impractical and esoteric short films and long books. My work is in private collections all over the world; I’ve exhibited across the United States and was a featured artist at Doll Prague in 2019. For the last year, I have been developing Course Content for the new NIADA Academy and discovering a love of teaching that I hadn’t known was in me!
academy.niada.org
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doters.etsy.com
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