I am a doll maker. It’s how I make sense of the world. Dolls can take many forms stone, bone, twig, fur, grasses – all intentions wrapped up in whatever materials are available. They are offerings and dedications, prayers and gratitude’s, hopes, joy, requests and deep grief, dolls can hold them all.
Someone once asked me, what is it that radicalizes you? For me the answer is a cycle, it begins rooted in a deep love of something ancient that was never quite tangible enough to give words to yet it manifests in a relationship with the land and a yearning to support the rights of women and girls and animals around the planet.
The Radical Doll Maker
We need more radicalizing. The etymology of the word is ‘forming the root’ and so I call myself a Radical Doll Maker – taking the practice back to its roots and making a connection to those hands who made ancient dolls such as the Woman of Willendorf or the first clay doll - the Woman of Dolní Věstonice. Today, it feels a radical practice to connect to all those ancient hands, emotions, lives, imaginations and rituals. A tradition of doll making in which dolls formed part of a way of making sense of things, or expressing ways to give form to things that don’t make sense.
Paper Doll Collage
In today’s world it’s creativity, imagination and ritual that keep me sane. The act of doll making connects me to distant ancestors and allows me to sink into those relationships through creativity and imagination. Doll making is something tangible that holds a sense of ancientness, a sense that things weren’t always this way. Paper dolls help me explore my thoughts, help me turn off my chattering head and for exploring issues, considering their origin and working out what part I can play - a creative resistance.
Cutting a figure out of paper and drawing, painting, doodling and collaging is doll making. Paper doll collages can be used for:
Inspiring social and environmental justice
Prayers
Intentions you want to work with
Worries - calming the mind
Hopes
Grief
The ‘I don’t even know how to - I’m stuck’
I’ve got an idea but don’t know the next step
Divinations
Rituals
Collage title - A Prayer Whispered into the Dawn
‘A prayer whispered into the dawn, under a waning moon and stars. A prayer for all those leaving this world today and moving onto the next world. May they be wrapped in soft owl wings, swan feathers to carry them in their return home.
Collage title - Storm Hag
You Can ‘Art’
In workshops one of the biggest hurdles I see people face is in reacting to the word ‘art’ and what it implies. We can all ‘art’, art is doodles, art is cutting out some words and images. There are no rules, no definitions to art. Sometimes ‘art’ needs a breathing space, time to just sit and then we can return to it. Sometimes this space can act like a divination, such as the collage I created above - in a few days I learned of hurricane Florence took the unusual path of hitting landfall on the coast of NC and was due to come inland towards the Blue Ridge Mountains.
By our very nature as being human we are creative – we dream, daydream, we solve problems, generate new ideas, see the world in our unique way, we make new connections where there weren’t ones before and ultimately we create new solutions to fit how we work in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to exist without imagination.
A personal ritual around blood ties
The Wheel of the Year
Paper doll collages came out of a way of exploring earth based festivals. Each festival extends an invitation to consider anything that’s on your mind. You might want to dig a little deeper and see what the energies of the festival represent. I have been following the Wheel of the Year since I was 16, yet these stories have morphed and changed over the years as my insights and beliefs have changed.
The Paper Doll form, a woman with arms raised, is a fitting canvas to record what is going on with us at that particular holyday. It can offer a prompt to record where we are with the deep intentions we have chosen to honor in our lives. Each festival offers an opportunity to review and to change things. What’s working for us, what isn’t working – and can provide an interesting review when we look back over this record of our journey around the wheel.
Ritual does not need to be some big overwhelming organized event; it can take the form of a small personal gesture. This can be a small act carried beside your altar, with a circle of women or outside under your favorite tree. The paper doll form can be used within your ritual, your art-making forming the gesture or it can be used to record the ritual itself and the insights your received.
Everything is Political
Another way to use Paper Dolls is in exploring how you play your part in making a difference. You could start with a quote that really speaks to you, I used the words of Audre Lorde.
We all have been brought up in a patriarchal society as a white woman I start with myself as I explore what part I play in racism. Racism is a white persons issue and art is a way to start that exploration, to examine your families roots and commit to making a difference.
“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Digital art exploring the foundations of Canada Day and the continued genocide of indigenous peoples. From the residential school system, ongoing breaches of Fist Nation and Inuit rights and the thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women.
Art is a place to start, to explore the systems in place which created this imbalance (Colonialism) and an opportunity to educate ourselves and support grassroots groups.
Collage Steps
1. Collage Template – Download and print out the Paper Doll template (see button above) and cut out the basic shape onto paper or cardstock - you’ll find a downloadable template at the end of the guide. Print out on paper, cut out and trace to use black card. Or, just draw the outline onto a piece of card.
2. Record your intention. You can write the date, time of the year, moon phase on the back with a note around what you are working with. Or you could write this on the front before you cover it up with color and collage.
3. Color - Give your paper doll form a base coat of color using pastels, pencils, crayons or acrylic paints.
4. Collage. there is no rules to collaging - you may wish to write words, cut our words to accompany your images.
5. Embellishments – Along with cut out images you can use other embellishments such as sewing on charms, buttons and beads. You can use yarn for hair or clay faces.
Keeping a Record of Collages - You may wish to keep your collages; I like to hang mine to display them. Sometimes I destroy them after making them as the need for them just existed within the moment. You may even wish to ritually burn them.