So, here is the whole shebang. I know I was banging on about the greater glory of the square yesterday, but one of my concerns with the squares is how they speak to each other when lined up like so. Like a poem moving from stanza to stanza, or room to room.  There is something here about tension – the limbs straining to touch each other, the ear forced to listen, the torso hung up to dry like washing.  I quoted some Vasko Popa the other day, and I think this entire sequence has been influenced heavily by his ‘Games’.

It seems appropriate here to paste in a poem from The Breakfast Machine which I feel comes from the same place as these images.

********************

Dolls

This one’s child has emptied her tears
into its heart and turned it to salt.
Poor salt doll,
there’s no end to her sorrows.

*
There’s always someone to do your dirty work,
always someone
with plucked-out eye,
with snapped-off hands.

*
A froufrou legion
with wide-awake eyes
in the junkshop window,
they have all lost their names.

*
Made of wax
they will inherit the earth
if that’s what you want –
there’s all manner of spells.

********************

I am waiting for a box of doll parts to arrive from an ebay seller, and in the meantime have been forced into creating a lunar landscape with cow and fresh water pearls.  If it works I will put it up here.  If it doesn’t, let us speak no more of it…

After one of the comments from yesterday’s post, I was reminded of this poem which plays with the ambiguity of doll bodies – the child/woman thing. Dolls are most peculiar if you really look at them. (I have really been looking at them) Playing House was in Smiths Knoll a couple of years ago, but hasn’t been collected yet because I realized when I was putting The Breakfast Machine together that it wasn’t part of that book, but part of a future one.  The collection I am writing at the moment is loosely based on my childhood.  There are more of these newer poems on the ‘Poems’ page of this site.

I’ll put up a pic of the triptych tomorrow – all three square canvases in a landscape narrative …bated breath, you say?

Playing House

I am constructing a house
from cardboard and fabric
and bits of flowery wallpaper,

while my mother sings
the song of a girl
as she skips with a rope.

There is a black and white cat
skit-skattering round the hall
with a cotton reel.

The walls are held together
with sellotape, and the roof
is an upside down box.

And the bed that I’ve made
from a matchbox is big enough
for only my smallest doll

who is hairless now, and almost
eyeless; who has the head
of a child, the body of a woman.

Ok, wait for it *drum roll*….for my next trick I present to you ladies and gentlemen, the third and final part of the aforementioned triptych which is entitled ‘Canvas Three’.  Once the limbs and head were removed, it looked to me like some kind of garment, so I just hung it up like a shop window display.

Martin and I were talking the other day about square and landscape formats, and how there is less of a space in a square frame for a narrative. The eye isn’t taken on a large compositional  journey, but is forced to make connections in a narrower space  – perhaps to climb into it as one would a poem.  Who knows, but I do love a square format, there is something certain and deliberate about the square.  The rectangle is less sure of itself.  When Roger Hargreaves made Mr Strong, he chose a square, not a rectangle. Point proven.  (Insert image of Mr Strong in your mind’s eye.  The internet wouldn’t let me poach one.  I can see it’s point, but it has ruined mine!)

So it appears I am making a triptych.  I have been using the other parts of the doll whose limbs appeared on this blog last week.  I am not altogether certain if the box translates as well into 2D because of the scale of the ear – it kind of gets lost, but here it is anyway.  I did try making this using a larger ear which I had surgically removed from a Girlsworld.  You know, one of those heads you can acquire to apply make-up to and style its hair with curlers and so forth.  But the Girlsworld ear was too orange, too spray-tan-looking and not as well molded as this one.  It also made me think of Van Gogh, which I didn’t want.

What I was thinking of, was Vasko Popa’s poem ‘Between Games’ from his Games sequence:

And this one has turned himself altogether into an ear

And heard everything that’s not to be heard

But he’s had enough

And is aching to turn back into himself

But without ears, he can’t see how.

The third part of the triptych will involve the doll’s torso.  By using every part of the doll, it feels like less like unmitigated doll cruelty.  A bit like using animal pelts for clothing and their bones to boil down for stock.  The eyes of the doll look too prettily painted-on for me to be able to use convincingly anywhere.  It doesn’t mean to say they are not watching my every movement.

“Is that a Betsy-Wetsy Doll?” inquired the lilac clad old lady behind the counter at Save The Children shop as I placed the object on the counter.  “Er….” I replied. I must confess that I really hadn’t checked out its credentials – just thought its ears were the perfect size and colour for one of my canvas box things.  She pulled down the nappy and showed me that it was indeed a Betsy Wetsy Doll – one of those things you feed water to, then squish its tummy to make it cry and wee.

She remarked on its life-likeness as she cradled it, then held it up to her shoulder, rubbing its back and talked a bit about her grand-daughter.  I made polite noises, but didn’t invent a daughter or niece to normalize the transaction.  She still said “I’m glad it’s going to a good home” as I shoved the doll headfirst into my bag with my leather-gloved hands.  I felt terribly Cruella as I turned heel in my two-tone brogues and exited the shop quick-smart.

I slunk home like  a wicked step-mother, wondering if she’d have refused to sell it to me if I told her it was destined for my art table which currently looks like a crime scene waiting for the doll police to investigate.  And then I got to thinking – what is most cruel – squishing its tummy to make it cry real tears and then when you’ve outgrown it, giving it to a second hand shop.  Or, transforming it – nay immortalizing it as art.  This dear reader, is how I plucked out the seeds of guilt the lilac clad old lady in the Save the Children shop had sewn in my head.  I still haven’t taken it out of my bag yet.  And by the way, it is a she.

For about three years I have had six Windsor and Newton 6X6 canvases I bought in a sale at £2 each.  Because I am not a ‘proper’ artist, I haven’t done anything with them.   I refer you to my last blog entry for not being THAT good at drawing.  Same goes for painting.

So I was looking for a box in my box box, and came across one of the canvases.  I removed the plastic which had kept it three years in my possession, unsullied.  Now it was open to the room and me, and whatever we could throw at it.  This proved a bit much for me, so I left it on the table and went downstairs to make a coffee.  The room talked amongst itself.

When I came back to, the frame was back to front, with its tummy on the table.  I don’t think it did it on its own, dear reader, I imagine I left it like that in my haste. I had always preferred the underside of these things, with staples holding the canvas taut, and the factory markings inked on.  I like the way that every material used to make the object are tensing to be that object, and not just separate materials.    And these are lovely sturdy things – more wood than canvas, they are.  In fact, from the back, they almost look like….. boxes.  The penny drops after three years.  Sometimes I shake my head sadly at myself from the other side of the room.

I think I was so set on the idea of ‘one day I will paint something wonderful on this surface’, that I was too dense to realise why I picked them up in the first place.  They are satisfying objects, not waiting surfaces.  This feels like a major breakthrough somehow, and part of the process of finding my ‘voice’ as a visual artist/practioner/whatever.

I’m pasting the ‘thing’ in here.  You will see a doll has been harmed in the making of it.  If it makes you feel any better, the doll had also been sitting around in my materials store for years and years.  Here she is finally being put to use.  Her ears are being used in another piece, but her eyes were too pretty…