The one above particularly feels very creepy to me as it has no eyes perhaps, It looks real. Too real to be a doll. Feels like the film Chucky.
Another woman has buried a baby
This is another classic case at attempting to seek social inclusion and a place in society in very personal and emotional circumstances. Are these women - who are obviously psychologically tortured – to be treated as criminals or to be helped to deal with their emotional problems?
The number of women who are exhibiting this baby
Little girls love dolls and they grow up playing with dolls made out of grass and banana fibres. The dolls become like babies to us whether they are made of plastic of banana fibres. We wash them, feed them and dress them up. We sing them to sleep. They fall sick and we worry and get our sisters to act as nurse and give them medicine.
All this play is preparation for the real thing. We are little women waiting to become mothers. We grow up, get married and wait for the baby. But sadly, for one out of every six women, that baby never comes and that’s when one’s world begins to shatter. The road that leads to acceptance that you can’t have children is a long one. And perhaps one can never know the anguish and longing of the woman who cannot have children, except that woman herself.
The people closest to you are hardest to deal with - your family, aunts, friends and in-laws. They see your pain but they cannot help for the subject of fertility is a difficult one to discuss. Then your friends start having babies and you have to go through visits, baptisms, birthday parties which you attend with a brave face. The person who can most feel your pain and help you is your husband and if that happens then the pain is reduced because a problem shared is a problem halved.
If your husband turns against you when society points its fingers of stigma and shame at you, then it can be very stressful. If he starts seeing other women or brings another wife, then it’s like rubbing salt in your wound.
Now there is one thing that we “little women” never did to our dolls. We never ever let them die and therefore we never had to bury them. For instance when Namatovu buried those dolls, she carried our childhood fantasy into the world of reality. She went beyond our loving and cuddling of the dolls, to the sad reality that sometimes the babies die and we have to bury them. Namatovu went to that extent because of the pressure society places on women who cannot bear children. The sentence imposed on her was unjust because society which is part and parcel of the problem was not put to account.
Was looking online and came across these dolls - they reminded me of Karen Justl's work, with their white faces. They were called 'handmades and you could phone to have them customly made. They come in a coffin-shaped box and have their own death certificate. I think it is a play on what is a live and what is dead? This state in the middle which follows vampires and other 'evil' monsters.
Sullivan discovered the body of Mrs. Borden upstairs in the guest bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Borden had both been killed by blows from a hatchet, which in the case of Andrew Borden, not only crushed his skull but cleanly split his left eyeball'I find this story very interesting, to know they still have not solved the mysteries of what happened. The trace of a killer, but no killer to fully convict. Was it right convict Lizzie Borden?
These dolls are alike many other dolls - all dolls have different cultures and backgrounds, suiting different people from different cultures and who have different feelings and thoughts. The idea though, of a doll based on someone? I read in an article of a man who lost his wife last week in the paper. He loved her and missed her so much, he made a sex doll to look like her, so that he could carry on making love to it. Something to me here, feels slightly wrong. They are not allowing themselves to get over the loss. He is holding on to her and not moving on in his life. Not letting her go. Another reason - many females cant have children. Some have been known to buy the dolls, so it feels like they have children. Again, this is where emotion has taken over the brain. They perhaps dont want to come to the conclusion they cant have children and therefore have to refer to using a doll. (very life-like as with the work of the artist Els Oosema - on blog). Is there something wrong in this? I think i will look more into this perhaps.
"We are interested in shock - in convulsion. We are obsessed with the failed attempt at producing objects with a vertiginous obscenity attached to them; in being purely gratuitous and rejecting critical worth. But even more, we are interested in how even the most abject object is recuperated to 'use value'. We are interested in the redemptive value of transgression, and how morality is squeezed from sin. We fantasize about producing things with zero cultural value, to produce aesthetic inertia - a series of works of art to be consumed and then forgotten." -excerpted from a conversation with Robert Rosenblum.
These are 2 exerts from the website http://artseensoho.com/Art/GAGOSIAN/chapman3
I looked at these two artists as they use mannequins of children (dolls). I dont necesserily like this work but i do find it interesting. S piece of their work names 'Death' 2003 (There are no photos on here) seems quite childish to me. Death seems to be a serious matter, however, they just seem to concentrate on to sex dolls taking the 69er position. This seems to be a teenage thing perhaps to 'much around', joke around, ignoring the state of death. The sculpture is made out of bronze but is made to look like plastic. This creates that every day object, but also allows something very very heavy to be light. due to the associations of inflatable objects. The bronze perhaps shows the time it will last - you cant destroy it as easily as an inlattable plastic object. This perhaps shows Death is always there and you cant get rid of it.
The top image, was an image i saw i believe at the Whitechappel Gallery about 2006, when i was doing my foundation. I remember seeing this for the first time and being completely shocked and thinking that the two artists were peodaphiles (cant spell) because of the mannequins in the form of children. I know how they like to shock people. Maybe this is purely why they did it? It takes on a 'hellish' quality to it. They are there, looking out at the audience as a specticle. they seem to be mostly girls. Maybe 1 boy, but not sure. They dont seem upset.
