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Dolls are such fertile ground for interesting imagery. We can readily identify with them, since they’re made in our image, but that can be both attractive and repellent. The more they become like us, the more disquieting they seem to become. Perhaps we begin to see things in them we don’t like in ourselves. This series is an exploration of that fascination/revulsion we have for these little “alter egos.”

I first went looking for images that most people find disturbing: the old porcelain Victorian dolls with huge glassy eyes and teeth, the eerie, much-too realistic looking modern infant dolls (so realistic it’s like carrying a tiny little cadaver around), and the old Barbies with their built-in vampiness, before that hard-edged sexual look was replaced by a vacuous tanning salon smile. Plenty could be projected onto existing dolls, but it soon wasn’t enough to just find them; I needed to create my own. I started taking dolls apart to reconfigure them into new creations, and embellished existing images to make a certain narrative point—as in the doll with the arm for a head in “Blonde Hair” and the elongated nose in “Heat Transfer”, respectively.

As these dolls became less “normal” in appearance, the more signs of humanity I began to see in them: desire, greed, vanity, confusion. A doll with no head lovingly strokes a sheaf of beautiful blonde hair. A doll with no feet insists on wearing gold heel shoes. A dummy can’t seem to keep his mouth closed. Dolls are supposed to be ourselves perfected, but they seem to function better as mirrors of our imperfections.

Stephanie Han Windham, 2008