New Work: Poor Dolly

Poor Dolly
Assemblage made from found objects: old domed box, doll, old photograph, silk flowers, child's shoe, fabric.
16"x 18 1/2"x6"


This doll shrine came together over the course of one night, although all the pieces were in my workroom for months. I found the the old dome box and the doll at an estate auction in July. I was so excited to put them together then. The doll fit perfectly into the box, like it was a cradle made just for her.  I don't know why it took me two months to actually glue and screw the piece together. I think I was having a little bit of a commitment issue. That's what I call it when you can see the piece in your head, you know you should do it, but you still walk around it and avoid finishing it. So tonight, the tienen duende, the chill in the air or the falling leaves, must have got to me, because the macabre creeped into the workroom and let me finish this piece. So much for the other things I had on the to do list....

She (the doll) reminds me of a time when I was young, probably around 4 years old. We were living upstate NY. My sister had a Mrs Beadsley doll. Christine was probably about 2 years old, and loved that thing to death. Some boys in the neighborhood, grabbed the doll from her and threw it over the fence into the "swamp:" A very wet wood area out back behind the housing development where we used to live.  Mrs Beadsley hung for months and months in a tree in the swamp, in a place where no one, in their right mind, would ever attempt to pull her out. So she decayed there, growing dirtier and dirtier, until finally one day she was gone. Probably her shirt had given way and she fell into the muck. Noone really knows what became of her.  Parts of her are probably there stil.


In part, this shrine is dedicated to all the things that are lost; the things we can never get back, to all the things that decay, only to reveal another of beauty underneath the paint and the gloss.