October 2011:
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Can dolls be art?
By Brian Bowman
If your definition of art depends on combining skill and imagination to produce something original, then yes, Regina has skilled artists working in that medium, too. Jo Anne Lauder and Hally Levesque make dolls. But these dolls are not playthings, and like any mature art form (doll making goes waaaay back) there are differences. Lauder makes evocative, “primitive” dolls; Levesque makes finely featured cloth dolls that are painstakingly rendered and reminiscent of ‘bisque” or porcelain.
Why dolls?
“I became frustrated with the creative limitations of my career,” says Lauder, a graphic designer, “and I began looking for a new challenge. A voice inside my head kept telling me ‘do what you know’. Lauder knew how to sew because her grandmother, a milliner by trade, demanded she share her interest in handwork. “I didn’t like it very much, but I loved dolls and was keen to make dresses for them as well as the family cat. The dresses turned out badly, but the process produced a seed.”
That seed took root when she examined her options and combined a pressing need to reduce her large and varied stock of bits of fabric with an admiration for primitive dolls from the Canadian Arctic. The appeal was two-fold. Making and clothing similar dolls would gradually deplete her hoard of lovely but useless fabric and produce something original that would encompass all her talents. The challenge, and the creative outlet, seemed obvious.
Levesque learned to sew at grade-school. “Home Economics once a week was part of the curriculum in those days. I wasn’t particularly good at sewing, but my cooking was even worse.” That early training was revived later, when as a member of a middle-eastern dance troupe, she had to make her own costumes. She collected bisque dolls even after she was married, and when she discovered that a local woman was teaching the craft of bisque doll-making, she enrolled, mastered the technique and eventually began to yearn for something more creatively fulfilling.
“As much as I enjoyed making the bisque dolls, I began to feel the desire to make a doll that was completely my own and not something that came out of a mould based on someone else’s work,” says Levesque. She began researching other types of dolls. When she came across an image of a beautifully rendered cloth doll, in period attire, she realized that these dolls, too, could be more than playthings.
For both artists, making cloth dolls satisfied the need to be genuinely creative.
Says Lauder: “All of my dolls are one-of-a-kind and created from my own original patterns. They range from the very simple to more complex dolls with jointed arms and legs. Clothes are original designs and made from vintage treasures like silk scarves, antique lace, linen tea towels and recycled wool sweaters. The dolls’ hair looks and feels natural and I was lucky to find a good source of locally-produced, unspun, wool that has worked really well. The dolls are luxuriously tactile. Even the way they fit in your hand feels good. Their average height is 14 inches.”
Levesque considers her dolls to be an accumulation of various doll making techniques. She hesitates to call them unique, but says she has yet to see any others quite like them. “It is very important to me that my dolls have an expression about them - that they ‘speak’ to the observer in some way,” she says. The cloth dolls have allowed me to learn about soft-sculpting and body construction - how to design body parts to better express the look that I am trying to achieve. Other times I let the doll dictate the outcome. Whatever gets me going, I always sit down with pen and paper and sketch a picture to keep me on track. I spend a lot of time researching costuming to ensure that the outcome is a fairly accurate representation in terms of fabric selection, hair styling, accessories, etc.”
Both artists sell their dolls privately and on the Internet. Lauder’s shop name on Etsy.com – an online artists’ marketplace, can be found at: Jo Anne Lauder - Prairie Girls Passion
Hally Leveque is also on Etsy.com at: Doll Castle Creations
But it isn’t about money.
Says Levesque: “Doll making has brought me a great deal of enjoyment. But what is truly rewarding for me are the responses I’ve received from people who have taken my dolls into their homes over the years. To know that you have been responsible for creating something that has brought pleasure to others is truly fulfilling. It’s the proverbial icing on the cake.”
