Sorry for a bit of radio silence. I was dressing a doll which a collector bought at Miniatura.
The main reason I make porcelain dolls, rather than any other kind, is their durability.
Porcelain as a medium for any kind of art, is so well known for its strength that in past centuries, Lloyds of London, insuring ships and their contents, insisted on the ballast in the hold being plates and cups and tableware of porcelain, china and other glazed ceramics because they knew if the ship went down the porcelain could be recovered from the sea bed and sold to offset the cost of saving the wreck.
I have an eighteenth century drinking bowl, glazed blue and white porcelain, which went down with the Tek Sing, a Vietnamese trader, subsequently being retrieved by divers and sold by a TV shopping channel, as good as the day it went down. It has very slight marine encrustation but only on the outside, you could still drink your tea out of it and, at the price the shopping channel sold the cups for, a good investment.
Of course, making dolls from porcelain involves numerous skills which are difficult to master, especially if like me, if you could only afford one afternoon’s class to see what was entailed. Afterwards I was self-taught, which might be an advantage, no one was there to tell me something was difficult, so I was able to fail at my own pace.
I will in time show you some of the ways in which you can make a doll. There are many. At any Miniatura you will find artists producing dolls in all the ways they can be produced, each way having its own advantages and disadvantages, as well as its own particular appearance.
Nothing beats porcelain for difficulty of manufacture, creating potentially hundreds of years of existence.
As each piece of porcelain achieves 1200 degrees in the kiln, the jacket of air round each molecule of porcelain clay is driven off. The clay body shrinks and will stay that way even if sunk to the bottom of the sea for three hundred years. The change at molecular level is what makes all fired clay bodies durable. There is Ancient Egyptian pottery which is 5,000 years old in museums, still looking much the same as the day it was made.
Each piece of porcelain in a doll I have made, could be disassembled, washed and put together again, forever. All the dolls are capable of being restrung, reassembled, redressed, rewigged and good as new forever. For a small fee I’ll do any and all of those and when I have gone to the big workshop in the sky any museum that has old porcelain dolls will know how to conserve any of my dolls because they are made in exactly the same way as all the old dolls were. No shortcuts, no glue guns, no wired armatures, no glued-on clothing, all proper.
Why? Several reasons, one being that when I began miniaturising there was a lot of talk about a dolls house being an heirloom, which it is. But it’s only as heirloomy as all the stuff in it will last. All the miniatures which are true miniature versions of already existing big artefacts made in the same way using the same materials, such as miniature silverware made by silversmiths, miniature furniture made of wood by carpenters, miniature textiles woven, embroidered and sewn by textile artists of various sorts, will last, because they already have done so.
The other main reason is that it doesn’t take long to realise how very clever miniaturists are. The hobby attracts very able people. If they can do something themselves, they will. When I was writing for Dolls House World editor Lynne and I insisted that as many published items as possible featured the fantastic craftsman version, the kit version and the one you could do for nothing out of cereal boxes.
Therefore, if you are going to make and sell anything to miniaturists it should be something they cannot easily do for themselves. Thirty five years ago we got our first credit card to buy a kiln, which cost a thousand pounds. I was terrified of the cost, terrified of the kiln, and horrified by the items that appeared from the first few firings. The learning curve was almost vertical but you could definitely argue that was not an investment that most miniaturists would be likely to make. Looking back it was as much an investment in myself as anything else. Apart from gardening and writing nothing else has proved as interesting for as long.
There are artists producing porcelain dolls from commercially available moulds. These are all over the world, and, of course, all look the same. There are artists producing dolls from ‘tweaked’ mouldings. While the clay is wet you can manipulate it.
There are not that many artists making dolls from their own original sculptures. It’s difficult. It’s also not very rewarding financially. If I made dolls from commercial moulds, of the type that have separate heads, hands and feet with soft bodies and then dressed them in a set of patterns that were either commercially available, from a book, or worked out by me and then endlessly reproduced, I could actually make a very slightly profitable business. I have interviewed artists who did exactly that. Some years they were into profit, some not.
I am very definitely on the side of art. Every single doll has come out of my brain, down my arm and out through my fingers, via the kiln, into the world. I once worked out that I work for 40p an hour. I should probably sack myself.
But that last reason I do it this way is that it makes people happy. I know many happy collectors, I have many happy collectors.
If you spend your working days making people happy, I think that’s a good thing to do with your life.
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