Masha du Toit

A school of fish, a murder of ravens, and a fascination of …dolls.

When I was a little girl I played with dolls but they were not nearly as fascinating as my Lego or train set.  But these days I’ve found a different world of dolls.

I’ve been searching on-line for examples of interesting dolls.  I make dolls myself.  I cant spend much time on them as I have to work 😦 and looking through doll maker Marina Bychkova ‘s site I must admit to a twinge or two of jealously.

Marina is a queen of doll makers.  On the one hand is the level of her craft – the excellence of her materials – porcelain, silk, stainless steel, leather.  On the other is her distinctive style.  A strange combination of sweetness and…pain? For example, “Bride of Frankenstein” pictured above.  This is probably the most obvious example.  Here are some other favourites:

Snow White – bruised:

This young tattooed lady is called “The Vessel”.

A detail of the horrible little “golden lilies” – the bound feet of a Chinese princess :

You can find a nice summary of her process here.    Click on the image links on the side to progress to the next page. Its quite intimidating – from mold making, firing, glazing, stringing and making the costumes.

“…sometimes I feel bad about covering up their beautiful jointed bodies.  So I console myself by making the costume a masterpiece of bead and gemstone embroidery.”

Maryna has quite a following.  You can follow her blog, or join her forum.

From a completely different universe of creatures are these rainbow creations from Muju Toys

Elsa Mora is always interesting too:

She has more than one blog.  This one, and her  “all about paper cutting”  which is filled with images of her ethereal paper cut images.  Off topic, but I simply have to insert an example

I found the work of Amy Leonard very inspirational.  She builds fantastical found object landscapes into glass containers:

Finally, an endless source of strange doll images is “Miss Polly has a Dolly“.  Sometimes frustrating, as the sources are not always stated and you cant tell where the images are from.  Lately it seems to have improved. But I still dont know where this little creature is from: