The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

January 28, 2014January 29, 2014 / Lady Lazarus / Leave a comment

Dollhouse enthusiasts are frequently known for their slavish devotion to detail. Countless hours will be spent in replicating a miniature world, whether idealized or dystopian, in exacting detail. The nineteen dollhouse rooms created by Frances Glessner Lee, however, take this attention to detail to startling — and brilliantly macabre — heights.

Frances Glessner Lee was a Chicago heiress with a curious obsession. During the 1940’s, Lee was a volunteer police officer with a honorary captain’s rank, and she possessed a passion for forensic science. At her New Hampshire estate, she installed a workshop to fashion crime scene dioramas, which she dubbed her “Nutshells”. These dollhouse-sized rooms were designed as classroom tools to instruct detectives in crime scene investigation. Lee founded Harvard’s department of legal medicine, the first program in the nation for forensic pathology.

According to a New York Times article on Lee, the Nutshells now reside in the office of the Maryland state examiner in Baltimore, where they are still used in seminars. Each diorama is packed with small-scale clues such as blood-splatters, a pillowcase smeared with lipstick, and a bullet embedded in a wall.

Corinne May Botz published a book of photographs entitled The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, that beautifully capture the details of Lee’s crime scene “nutshells”. Below are some images from Botz’s book.

Dolls House & Miniature Scene Magazine interview.

November 5, 2013September 12, 2014 / Lady Lazarus / 2 Comments

Somehow, I completely forgot to post the interview I had back in August 2013 with the UK-based magazine Dolls House & Miniature Scene. Here’s a scan of the layout and the article. The interview was focused on my earlier project, The Disobedient Dollhouse. Click on the images below to get a larger (and much more legible) article.

I found it amusing how the editor kept insisting on changing the title of my work to conform to the British usage of the term “dollshouse” with the plural, rather than my North American-derived term “dollhouse”. Whatever.

The Haunted Dollhouse, revisited.

August 6, 2013January 29, 2014 / Lady Lazarus / Leave a comment

Back in July of 2010, I wrote a blog post entitled The Haunted Dollhouse in which I briefly discussed this interesting and unconventional approach to the miniature house. Created by artists and hobbyists alike, the haunted dollhouse can range greatly from the kitschy, Halloween-themed miniature festooned with cotton-batting cobwebs and tiny jack o’ lanterns, to epic, post-apocalyptic landscapes created in miniature scale by a team of artists. Now, before I venture further in my discussion, I should define my use of the word dollhouse and explain that I’m employing it in the broadest possible sense. While the spooky Halloween-themed dollhouse can be more readily defined as a house, the post-apocalyptic landscape — while still miniature in scale — is less traditionally identifiable as such. Both, however, are miniatures that share a common link to the uncanny (see below).

So, with semantics out of the way, let’s continue with a quote taken from my earlier post on the dollhouse that links our enjoyment of the miniature with the experience of the uncanny:

There’s something inherently unnerving about a dollhouse. While we can easily admire and delight in its minuscule detail, this admiration is frequently accompanied by a sense of unease. This simultaneous intermingling of delight-with-unease is a manifestation of the uncanny — a sensation of anxiety experienced when one encounters “something familiar, yet foreign.” The dollhouse, with its miniaturized approximation of reality, recalls the familiar domestic setting of the home. At the same time, it falls short of appearing truly real. It’s the tension that exists within this disconnect — the miniature’s approximation of scaled-down reality with its inevitable failure — that contributes to our experience of the uncanny.

To reiterate, the uncanny is a sense of discomfort within the familiar setting of the home. I would argue that since the dollhouse is already imbued with an element of the uncanny, it’s not a far stretch to imagine and reconfigure the miniature as a nightmarish, dystopic space. This may have been the thought-process behind the Apocalyptic Manhattan (in an Apartment) project created by Swedish artist Magnus Johannson and his team when they designed and constructed the fifty miniature buildings of their mangled landscape. This extraordinarily-detailed, post-apocalyptic Manhattan was later featured in a Swedish music video in which the band members stomp through the model in Godzilla-like fashion.

A post-apocalyptic Manhattan, as envisioned by two artists from Sweden.

My favourite artist working in miniature, however, remains American photographer and diorama-artist Lori Nix. Blending a canny mixture of black humour with dread, she creates such varied post-apocalyptic miniature scenes as a burnt-out, long-abandoned beauty parlor, a subway car that has been gradually reclaimed by the surrounding sandy beach, and the interior of an empty mall which has been invaded by flora. Through her constructed dioramas, Nix “…imagines a human-less world where Mother Nature has reclaimed our cities.” (source).

“Beauty Shop” by Lori Nix. 18″x12″x33″

“Mall” by Lori Dix, 92″x42″x100″.

The haunted ‘Island of the Dolls.’

April 25, 2012January 29, 2014 / Lady Lazarus / 1 Comment

Some of the derelict inhabitants of “La Isla De La Muñecas”, located on Teshuilo Lake, Mexico.

Ghost stories. Every culture around the world has them and, whether they arise from ancient folklore, the Gothic novelists, or the humble campfire, they continue to both frighten and fascinate. What is it about the ghost story that has held our collective fascination from time immemorial? I have a personal theory that, beyond their chilling narratives, there’s a psychological comfort to be derived from the ghost story. The very idea of a ‘ghost’ fundamentally supports the belief in an afterlife and that something exists beyond the grave. In spite of geographic, political, or cultural differences, an intrinsic fear of death is the one thing we all have in common.

So, if a good ghost story gives you a cold sort of comfort, then you might consider packing your bags for a trip to Mexico. Located on Teshuilo Lake in Mexico’s ancient Xochimilco district, the remote island dubbed La Isla De La Muñecas (or, ‘the Island of the Dolls’) has become a curious tourist destination for fans of the macabre. Festooned about this quiet and uninhabited island are thousands of dolls, supposedly left by the island’s former occupant to weather and decay. A tale of tragedy accompanies these dolls, offering a possible explanation as to their placement here:

In the late 1950s, Don Julian Santana Barrera came to inhabit the nameless island on Teshuilo Lake, which [was] then a lonely, overgrown spot and seemingly perfect for his hermit-like requirements.

But, unbeknownst to Julian, the quiet island has a dark history. Local legend maintains that in the 1920s three young girls were playing on the island, only for one of them to drown, falling into the canal’s murky waters close to a small jetty. The nearby residents claimed that the dead girl’s spirit refused to pass on and remained tethered to the island. The area soon gained a degree of infamy and few dared to venture near the supposedly haunted land, especially at night.

Now, with Julian’s arrival, the girl’s spirit once again had someone to talk to. She told him of the manner of her death and asked him to find dolls for her to play with; adding that they would also help to ward off the ancient and evil spirits that still wandered the prehistoric wetlands. Evidently, Julian listened to the girl’s appeal, and began to search the area, scouring the rubbish dumps and plucking any discarded dolls that floated on the gently lapping waters of the cloudy canals.

Some of the thousands of dolls that haunt “La Isla De La Muñecas”.

At first Julian was thought to be something of an oddity; a crackpot who would gather unwanted dolls because he thought they were actual children that he could nurse back to life, but eventually people realized that he was simply a harmless old man with a rather peculiar past-time. In time, Julian accrued so many dolls that the island came to be called La Isla de las Muñecas (The Island of Dolls) but according to Julian, no amount of plastic companions seemed to satisfy the spirit’s thirst, and soon thousands of the toys festooned the island’s every square foot. Julian even constructed a modest hut for the purpose of housing a shrine dedicated to the dead girl’s spirit and the most special dolls he was given.

On April 21st 2001, Julian and his nephew, Anastasio were fishing on the island. Julian told his nephew that strange voices had been calling out to him from the waters of the canals, beckoning him to enter the water and join them. He explained that he had often heard weird voices, but had always been able to resist their calls. The two men carried on fishing together until Anastasio left to undertake some errands. When he returned he discovered his uncle floating face down in the canal near the small pier – at the same place that the girl had lost her life in the 1920s.

— Source: ‘The Mexican Island Haunted by Evil Dolls‘, on the Environmental Graffiti blog.

Of course, the cynic in me says that the story of Julian Barrera and the drowned girl are completely apocryphal, and some enterprising locals collected discarded plastic dolls and decorated the island, inventing this ghost story in the hopes of attracting tourist dollars to an off-the-beaten-path region of Mexico. Whatever the truth behind the dolls, it’s still an impressive and effectively eerie sight to behold. Click on the link above to view more creepy photos of the ‘haunted’ Island of the Dolls.

The Haunted Dollhouse.

July 19, 2010January 29, 2014 / Lady Lazarus / 2 Comments

Sarah Anne Johnson, “Upstairs Hallway”, 2009, Chromogenic Print from “House on Fire” series

There’s something inherently unnerving about a dollhouse. While we can easily admire and delight in its minuscule detail, this admiration is frequently accompanied by a sense of unease. This simultaneous intermingling of delight-with-unease is a manifestation of the uncanny — a sensation of anxiety experienced when one encounters “something familiar, yet foreign.” The dollhouse, with its miniaturized approximation of reality, recalls the familiar domestic setting of the home. At the same time, it falls short of appearing truly real. It’s the tension that exists within this disconnect — the miniature’s approximation of scaled-down reality with its inevitable failure — that contributes to our experience of the uncanny.

It is perhaps due to the uncanny nature of dollhouses that a curious subgenre has arisen — the haunted dollhouse. These are so popular that many web sites for dollhouse enthusiasts are now featuring “haunted dollhouse kits” for purchase. These range from kitschy, Halloween-variety spookiness to gloriously Gothic miniatures. Artists have, of course, also delved into this spooky realm. The chromogenic prints of Winnipeg-based visual artist Sarah Anne Johnson astutely edit out the campy cobwebs and, through her effective use of lighting and cropping, get straight at the mysterious elements of her miniature interiors. While it’s uncertain if Johnson would classify her dollhouse in the House on Fire series as haunted, it does strongly evoke some of the unnerving elements of the uncanny. I’m an immense fan of this series.