The museum has been quiet since a flurry of excitement about the epic Joseph Cornell exhibition at the Royal Academy this Summer. I must confess that I’m finding it increasingly difficult to focus on this space with so much diversification within my own practice.
It’s a shame because the museum holds a wonderful collection of blog posts and has been exciting and rewarding to work on. I’m so grateful to all the artists who’ve participated and written posts. The answer in part is to re-tweet the posts from time to time. This is what I plan to do over the holidays. All that lovely material is stored here thanks to a-n so it takes only a few clicks to re-release the goodies to new readers.
On the eve of the biggest of Christian holidays when toys are stowed under fur trees (real or fake – another potential object for the museum!) it feels appropriate to donate these two dolls from my project. They are the postmemory dolls who’ve featured in several experimental videos. They were bought at my local art shop and then painted and dressed by me. They are German in origin but are no longer available through the art shop and I’ve been trying to source them online. I’ve been told that probably they’ve been taken out of production. How sad!
This kind of doll could become rare. I’ve seen others on the market but they don’t share quite the same aesthetic.
The joy of making them and learning to use iMovie to bring them to life has been immense. They fascinate me as vehicles of narrative but also pull at something ancient within me – the years spent in front of children’s television in the 1960s and 70s. My love for the aesthetic and story telling of The Magic Roundabout.
So I’m calling this post The Visitors because I imagine these dolls turning up wide eyed at the museum. They’ll love all the objects and spend a great deal of time trying to make sense of it all. I love the kind of logic children engage in when adults are not around to edit or correct them. I can just imagine the conversations they’ll have!
So it’s happy holidays from the museum and great excitement about unwrapping some of those old blog post! Ho! Ho! Ho!
