Alice Anderson at Artprojx Space

Alice Anderson at Artprojx Space

08 January, 2009
by: Katuschka

London exhibitions

Despite their reputation as beloved childhood toys, dolls are notoriously creepy objects. Whether it's the fixed, placid smiles, the vacant glass eyes crafted from pure evil, the superstitious voodoo connotations, or the very slight possibility that there might be the soul of a murderer trapped inside… dolls embody the uncanny, and awaken a primal sense of the self divided – when they're not sunbathing in their Malibu dream houses of course.

The art world – with its love of debauched innocence and precocious sexuality –  has taken this simple childhood plaything and fashioned it into a shuddering Buckaroo of Freudian innuendo and feminist discourse. Take, for example, Van Sowerwine's Play With Me installation or Etsuko Miura's skillfully warped creatures. Acclaimed artist Alice Anderson's new show The Dolls' Day at Artprojx Space revisits this theme, looking at the doll as a memory, a reduced and limited version of herself, frozen, helpless and trapped.

The exhibition has three sections. First up, a series of blood paintings, the weakest section of the show. In spite of dried blood's natural, rusty tempura glaze – which gives her crudely drawn talismans a vintage aesthetic – crack addict musos like Pete Doherty have relegated the medium into the higher echelons of pointless pretention. And the menstrual symbolism is, frankly, quite ick.

Next is Anderson's film and sculpture work. Inspired largely by folk and fairy tales, these reference Alice in Wonderland, Rapunzel, Bluebeard and Angela Carter's fairies. The tower sculptures re-engage the Rapunzel theme of entrapment and feminine identity in a phallocentric world, a theme which previously saw Anderson display over 3,000 metres of red hair through the Marc Chagall Museum in Paris. The works are both fragile and savage: helpless silicon dolls tumble through pins, sizzle on lamps and lie naked with their long red hair entwined, all encased in white and see-through cages. 

Lastly: Anderson's short film The Dolls' Day. It's an involved and disturbing work about reclaiming identity through the death of the parents. Anderson, a doll-like figure herself, is the 'heroine' caught in a cyclical mother/daughter complex, with the added weightiness of sexual advances from the Father.

We witness Anderson's birth (as she appears from under a sheet), physical attachment to the Mother (as Anderson kisses her mother's knee), anxiety riddled separation from the Mother (as Anderson falls out from the aforementioned sheet), domination by the Father (as Anderson is dragged lifeless around the floor and thrown into a chair) and eventual release, in a scene where she blithely destroys dolls of her father and mother.

It's all set against a background of pivoting ceilings, antique wheelchairs, draped furniture and Victorian surgical instruments. Dramatic stuff, although it swerves into moody goth territory at times and reminds me a little too much of the Mirror, Father, Mirror 'art' film piss-take in Ghost World. However Anderson somehow moulds the well-trampled turf into a whimsically eerie experience.

She is a naturally personable artist, but this exhibition draws you into her memories and dreams through her blood, image and personality. A real coup is a hyper-real doll of the artist herself commissioned from no less than Madame Tussauds, which embodies the underlying appeal of the show. Aside from the rich vein of imagery, this exhibition is an extension of the artist's brand, a peek through the veil which enshrouds the faceless name. As the artist is demystified, the doll and artist seem interchangeable, as vulnerable, complex doppelgangers. All the same, I'll be watching my back when I'm next around a Tiny Tears.

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Katuschka