Upcoming show in the Couve

Another year has passed and its finally time for the Vancouver Recycled Arts Festival in Vancouver, Washington. I've blogged before that its my favorite show, but it really is. I meet fun/interesting people and convert them to Creepy Baby Factory addicts. This year's show will be great...and it will kick off two new series of artwork. The first is hand crafted creepy voodoo dolls made by yours truly...and yours truly's partner. We used recycled fabric for the bodies and picked up a few unfinished cross stitch kits from Value Village for the embroidery thread. I re used the dye from the vinyl babies and stuffed them with dryer lint from my own dryer. PRESTO BANGO!! Creepy Voodoo dolls for everyone...or at least the first 8 people to buy them. I should call them diet dolls as they kept my hands busy in the evenings instead of snacking while watching TV. I can't help that I'm addicted to lousy TV shows. Voodoo dolls will be one of the new series, the other is the porcelain doll series. At any one given time, at any thrift store/Goodwill there are porcelain dolls stacked up like a cord of wood. Tons of them, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, trillions...I don't know what comes after trillions, but there's a lot of porcelain dolls out there. When I first saw them as a "raw material" for my artwork I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them. You can't dye them like a vinyl doll. They have limited posability like a Ken doll. Wrapping them up in plaster makes me look like a one trick pony. I pondered. It only took a few minutes of tinkering with one to figure out what I could do with a porcelain doll. Not all porcelain dolls are created equal. There are ones that are massed produced that one sees repeatedly in thrift stores. There are ones that are purchased on TV by famous performers from the 70's. There are ones produced in such small quantities that one buys them from a website after receiving an invitation via email, complete with online code and date/time slot. The older the doll the easier the wig/hat/hair come off. The more hand sculpture the more the doll looks like a cyborg when all of the facial features are painted. I prefer dolls that are not smiling. If they are smiling and have crazy eyes they might make it into the shopping cart, provided there aren't any other dolls without smiles. Just like anything else, I have to set a limit, set a standard and set a level of quality that I want my work to represent. The dolls take very well to metallic paint. When fully painted the porcelain dolls look like cyborgs. They have human features but absolutely no expression. The viewer of the artwork will bring the expressions to them. The porcelain dolls traded in their wigs, hats, dresses and finery for a more modern approach to fashion. One completed porcelain doll has a dress made from plastic sheeting strips. The plastic came from a bag that once held a comforter. Few ways exist to recycle plastic like that, so now its a dress for a copper colored doll. Another porcelain doll wears a gown from dryer sheets, all hand dyed and all hand sewn into place. Other porcelain dolls will wear garb from other recycled resources. I am giddy with excitement over the anticipated reaction from the patrons. I was not this excited wen I debuted my first table of Creepy Babies. The expression of slight shock and disbelief but also of awe and wonder. I expect to have 4 porcelain dolls in the new series. They take more time to create. Several layers of thin paint, several hours of hand stitching materials into place and several day's time to complete one doll. They take longer to create and they use more materials to create, in other words...bring your wallets, these bitches won't be cheap.