Child's Play

Using old, discarded dolls and toys, I set up scenarios evoking the fears, anxieties, and nightmares that are often part of early childhood experience.  Dolls are surrogates, given to little girls to role-play their future.  They come embedded with sunny attitudes, but after age and neglect they tell a different story.  Their expressions and battered condition now hold a history.  It's this vulnerability that I use to create scenes with psychological tension: trauma either has or is about to happen.