Well here’s a thing.  These new porcelain/rag bodied dolls are too big for my box format, so I have branched out a bit.  I don’t know why I decided to remove the head – habit I guess….but then I got to thinking, what about making some kind of hybrid.  In taxidermy, this is called crypto-taxidermy – it’s how mythical creatures can be invented.  It think it looks a bit like a portrait, rather than a picture taken to show what I have been making – like the Bunnychild was taken by its parents  to one of those photographers on high street, or in a shopping mall.  It was in fact taken by award-winning photographer Martin Figura, who added the vignette effect for me.

My butterflies arrived on Saturday.  Well, ‘Butterflies and Moths of the Basque Country’ to be exact.  There are about seventy of them in a flat display box all pinned neatly to polystyrene.  There is a sheet of hand-ruled paper in the lid of the box with notes about the poor victims in the box, in blue ink. There is no date on the study, but it looks a little like a school project, 60s or 70s by the style of handwriting.  There is a little pencil-drawn map of the Spanish/French border showing the Bay of Biscay and a few of the coastal towns.  An arrow points to St. Jean-de-Luz with the note and an arrow: ‘we stayed here.’

It seems fitting that these creatures were lured to their death in a place called ‘light’.  It’s a strange hobby  – killing enough things so you have a full compliment to make a sizeable collection.  I guess people have collected things for years though.  I am fascinated by the fashion of collection during Victorian times – the need to pin something down, to claim it and own it as empirical hard evidence.  In their book on Darwin, Desmond and Moore write of his uneasy relationship with nature, referring to his letters they talk of his striving to maintain proper scientific detachment, yet he cannot look outside his study window without being reminded of “The dreadful but quiet war of organic beings going on in the peaceful woods and smiling fields.”  It seems they point to a way of stilling the fear of the unknown.

The first butterfly listed is “Brimstone” and the note tells us “It haunts its favorite flowers like clover, knapweed and bramble.” On the Butterfly Conservation website, it says that “there is a view that the word ‘butterfly’ originates from the yellow ‘butter colour’ colour of male Brimstones” so here I have it – the original butterfly!

So what do I want with them?  I think I want them as metaphors.  It is important somehow that they have been part of somebody’s collection and they have already been transformed into objects before I get my paws onto them.  I have spoken before here about objects as words and words as objects, and it seems as if I am still playing at the same thing…..plus ça change….

Been bidding for and losing things on ebay.  I seem to stand more of a chance winning things that are damaged or only part there, which actually as it turns out, is probably for the best for my puposes.  The most recent things are a couple of cases of broken butterflies which nobody else wanted, for the princely sum of fifteen pounds.  I am feeling a bit like Bagpuss, as it happens.  I will let the whole metaphorical weight of broken butterflies pass by, almost unnoticed.  What was important to me is that the butterflies are antique i.e. not killed for the purpose of my delectation and delight.  I fancy these to be the very butterflies Nabakov ensnared, no less.  I have no idea what I will do with them when they arrive.

I didn’t know what I would do with these dolls eyes when they arrived either, but this is what I have done with them.  And I have quite a lot more in a box to see me through, as it were.

I found three of these 1950s dolls in a local flea market.  You can’t tell by this picture but they have very fierce accusatory eyes.  One of them is standing on the table in my studio and has been watching me since the first 10A scalpel blade was exercised at the start of this process.  I have the notion she is very likely composing her first collection of poetry which she will release under the pen name Metropolis Maria.   The limbs of these particular dolls are too hard and brittle to cut with a normal blade, so they have remained intact on my table – though on the outside of the packets they came in, are the instructions ‘Make and pin clothes to the doll’s soft body.’  Which suggests they were born for cruelty.  This is perhaps some kind of refutation on my part.

This morning I went to Hobbycraft – the Art and Craft Superstore – and got the same kick as I used to get when I went around Top Shop in my teens.  Aisle upon aisle of bright colours and sparkly bits and all the glue in the world to fix a miscellany of  objects to whatever surface you can possibly think of.  I went in there to get a glue gun and was quite restrained in that I got little else besides.  A bag of feathers as an impulse buy,  is all.   Upon closer inspection, many of the things in the store were a little pre-packaged for my liking.  Somebody has done all the imagining, and all you have to do is paint the right colours in the right places, or stick particular bits into particular slots, all neat and tidy.

The glue gun has given me a feeling of empowerment as I wield it Lara Croft like round my studio.  So far I have found no restrictions to its gluey-ness.  Marbles to metal – check, plastic to plastic – check, bird wings to bisque doll – check. The apparent  limitlessness is fair exhilarating.  Enough chat, now for another image…..

Again, I have utilized good old Aurthur Mee’s Encyclopedia for the text, and the bowl is filled with fresh water pearls.  A  huge stoke of luck here with the tooth – in a former life, our house was a dental surgery, and a set of sample crowns arrived on the door mat like a gift from heaven.  More please Almighty Lord Tooth Mouse, more please…

I have now finished the Well Versed school project, which I think went very well.  There was quite a lot of early starts and long drives involved in the schools Luke Wright and I were working at.  Cromer High School for example, have their first lesson at 8.20 am.  It is arguable whether any of us (workshop leaders and pupils) are awake enough to talk about poetry at that hour, but we all got through it twice this past week.

I have also run three other workshops, two in the evenings and have felt myself disappearing.  It’s impossible to write any poems myself while I am doing all of this teaching, but luckily I have been able to hang on to a bit of myself by making some visual pieces.  It’s even better when the pieces make themselves, such as this cyborg-doll head thing.  Once I had removed the head (she said darkly), there were some plastic tubes poking out from the throat.  This was one of those betsy-wetsy dolls, which you can feed and them make cry and wee by squishing the tummy.  I just added a few more cables from a television aerial.  If I were a proper conceptual artist, I am sure I could write a short essay here about how we are all becoming part-machine or something.  As it happens, I just thought the head was crying out for some cables.  I’ve hung this canvas over a door, so it looks a bit like a trophy head.