This is a selection of my doll collection. I often bring home dolls with when I am collecting. I find them in op-shops, usually looking very un-loved and a bit scruffy.


  I have also found them on the beach, washed up in the high tide, where plastic washes.


  Over time I have collected quite a collection. 


 I love each doll, each for different reasons. Some I love for what i know they willl become. These I will take apart and use. 


 One doll, affectionally named 'chesse legs', reminds me of Alice, from Alice in wonderland. 




'Cheese legs - Alice'  

 
 Time has been a cruel friend to these dolls. They are no longer fashionable, sadly discarded and, like in Toystory, put in a box and forgotten.






  I am celebrating these dolls, giving them new life and using them in my art and exhibtions. Though I may use legs, arms and heads sometimes, (seperate from bodies), it does not mean i do not love or  wish to de-value these dolls.


  Rather i see them as symbols - purity, innocence, youth, hope and joy. 


 My mums' own collection.

 Like all plastics in our lives, they are going to be with us a very long time. I hope to keep these dolls from landfill.

 
I did have dolls as a child, my knitted life size penguin from my nana, my brown teddy bear and a baby doll with a full set of knitted clothes from nana. I also had a soft flower doll, with petals around her face, which lived until my daughter washed her. And my most prized Sugar the white cat, she has no tummy from being over loved! So it's not like I missed out as a child. 
 
It got me thinking though, why this love for dolls?


  I grew up in Melbourne, with a family connection to the Vic. market and a mother who grew up in Richmond and loved the city. This meant every holidays, a trip to the city on trains and buses. Although quite tiring at the time,  I have so many fabulous memories of this time - (my favourite the 70's). I remember the downstairs Coles cafeteria, the Ladies toilet upstairs in Myers - ladies still wearing furs and touching up their make-up in the lounge lined with deep couches and elegant chairs. 
 
What I also remember is visiting the Block arcarde. An opulent covered shopping arcade in the heart of the city.In this arcarde I would press my face to this fabulous window of the Dafel's shop. This shop of doll's arms, legs, and heads.  Also golliwogs, miniature porcelain animals, wooden toys, dolls houses, miniature cars and a doll hospital. 


 Now, this may start to explain my love for dolls. Rather than being horrified at the boxes of bits and pieces, I was enthralled. Perhaps that is what I do, I am like a dolls hospital, fixing, mixing and creating new dolls and new lives for these un-loved dolls. Mostly I love the stories these old dolls have and I love creating new stories.

I don't see my love for dolls waining any time soon, and with an exhibition of work underway, in fact I think my feet are feeling itchy to collect right now!