The Dollmaker by Nina Allan

Author:Nina Allan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

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THE WOMAN WHO CAME to interview me for Art Now was called Sylvia Chambers. She positioned herself opposite me in the faded green wing chair I had owned since my days at Woolfenden, staring at me relentlessly over the rim of her teacup.

“Most people think of dolls as idealized representations of humanity,” she said. “Doll-face, living doll, that kind of thing. Your current work seems actively to be in conflict with that ideal. There are those who would argue it contradicts it entirely.” She bent forward to take a biscuit. “Would you say you do what you do in order to help counteract stereotypical presentations of physical deformity?”

“I don’t know about that,” I replied. “Mostly I would say that I love old dolls. Antique porcelain has a unique quality. It seems a tragedy to waste it.”

Sylvia Chambers scribbled her notes. She wasn’t satisfied with my answer, I could tell. “I don’t like to compare dolls with human beings,” I added. “The two are very different.”

“Would you say dolls were alien?” She had brightened up considerably.

“Not alien exactly, just…their own thing.”

She wrote down what I said, humming faintly to herself in what I could only interpret as glee. I had officially fulfilled my remit as a weirdo. Andrew Garvie sees his creations almost as representatives of an alien race, was how Sylvia Chambers interpreted my remarks for her article. His little monsters are an allegory for persecution and alienation in our pressurized and sometimes repressive urban environment.

As with the title, I did not protest. I felt annoyed by the way my words had been twisted, altered selectively to suit the writer’s own agenda. And yet I found I did not entirely disagree with what Chambers had written, either. My dolls were little dissidents, in their way. As human beings they would have faced lives of oppression, everything from run-of-the-mill name-calling to full social exclusion. And yet they persist, I told myself. Their very existence was a kind of protest, if not against anything so grand as “the political consensus” then at least against those bullies and tyrants who saw it as their business to dictate to others – at whatever level – how they should be living their lives.

Yes, I was proud of them. I was proud of the Art Now interview, too, though I didn’t fully realize it until much later.

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