Eri silk fibres, eri silk thread, Photoengraving on eri silk, silk dolls, unravelled thread, Dimensions variable, 2025
This installation consists of photoengravings on eri silk surfaces, dolls and threads. It looks at the staged photography of ill dolls on auction sites, online selling platforms, digital ephemera and doll hospitals. The imagined relationships between the dolls that the collectors create are full of care and tenderness, and are unexpected. These images are not meant to last long, they are made for the purpose of giving the doll away. These become part of collective histories of dolls and care. In one of them, a doll is laying in the other doll’s lap. In another, the doll lays on her friend’s shoulder for support. In one outside of view, someone sends a letter to the doll hospital, thanking them for fixing their doll, and informs them that the doll now has a new name.
All surfaces in this work - the silk papers, the silk dolls, and the unravelled threads - they are all made of eri silk fibres. The work is an ongoing experiment in understanding the nature of illness and pain, through repetitive engagement with a single material over a long period of time. Chronic illness exists in an infinite, but cramped dimensions of pain. It is always an ongoing decay, that slowly makes the body disappear. [Excerpt: In an advertisement of a doll hospital that functioned in London in the late 1900s, it mentioned: “Patients are admitted for wasting away of the body”. It is rare that someone goes to hospital for their decaying body, often it is not recognized as decay in humans, as it is expressed for dolls, that are somewhere between an object and a patient.]