Embroidery Dolls: A collection on Spheres
Translated by: Marina Oks
I started making dolls when I was a child. I was lucky enough to have one factory-made doll, which somehow disappeared when I was around six. I was born in the Soviet Union, in Moscow, and at that time, here and there, you could catch glimpses of images depicting representatives of the fifteen Soviet republics dressed in their national costumes. I was so mesmerized by their beauty and diversity that my first dolls, made of paper and later of modeling clay, were all dressed in traditional clothing. By the way, speaking of national specifics, part of my family comes from Ukraine, and I have vivid memories of traditional village houses where every centimeter of the walls, windows, and furniture was decorated with brightly and richly embroidered fabric. I also clearly remember the urge I had to create something similar!
Another piece of luck was that, as I was frequently ill as a child, to keep me occupied my mum taught me to embroider using satin stitch, cross-stitch, French knots, and hemstitch. I finished both a comprehensive secondary school and an art school at the same time. However, my parents were completely opposed to my pursuing an artistic career, believing it to be insecure and financially unstable. And so, I became a journalist and a literary editor.
But then, in 2002 I got really lucky again: my daughter was given a task to make a rag doll as part of her architecture studies assignment. It was at that moment that I realized I absolutely had to start making dolls myself. And it was a conscious decision on my part not to take any special courses to learn the craft, but instead to draw on my art education and independently look for engineering and expressive solutions. Since then I’ve been creating art dolls.
The further I went, the more I fell in love with this art, as a doll is a unique space where you can combine anything: wood and embroidery, metal and silk, water colors and clay, porcelaine and felted wool, and so on. Each material has its own character, its own expressive means, and it’s fascinating to combine them, clash them, make them talk and supplement each other. I don’t think I’ll ever drop it, as there are still lots of materials and techniques which I should try.
My portfolio includes numerous exhibitions in various countries, as well as my work as the art director of an ethnographic project run by the Council of Europe. It was this project that brought me to Portugal in 2013, where I have lived ever since.
A year ago my obsession with mixed media gave rise to a new project featuring dolls on the balls (although the project has no special name yet). Some time before that, I met Natalya Ivanycheva through an online course. She’s a professional architect. While her kids were very young, she learnt the technique of making felted wool and starting using it for creating balls. Those were small balls, about the size of Christmas tree ornaments. I was fascinated by that kind of art object I had never seen before, and I asked her to make me a few balls with the depiction of cities in the style of Hundertwasser. I placed an angel on each of them. The results were amazing! At that moment I decided we needed a much bigger project.
Why did we choose paintings by famous artists? Firstly, it was interesting to convert a flat depiction into a 3-D object. Secondly, the object had to be recognizable to create a wow-effect. I was curious to see people exclaiming in excitement: Oh, I know this painting!
I chose a few of my most famous works and tried to extend my enthusiasm to Natalya: to extract a character from a painting and to show them separately. My job would be to turn the main character into a doll using a variety of techniques, while Natalya would apply the background onto a ball combining wet and dry felting.
This way we created the following: Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” (mouliné thread and bead embroidery, an ornamental ball); Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Moulin Rouge: La Goulue” (a classical art doll, a poster on the ball); Marc Chagall’s “The Walk” (patchwork technique, a landscape on the ball); Kazimir Malevich’s “Woman with a Rake” (papier-mâché, a geometric pattern on the ball); Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of a Young Woman in a Straw Hat in a Wheat Field” (satin-stitch embroidery, a flowering meadow and irises on the ball); and a composite image of a Tahitian woman inspired by the paintings of Paul Gauguin (batik, a Polynesian landscape on the ball).
We were able to create a unique collection, which received an overwhelmingly positive response at the exhibition. But I’m sure this success would not have been possible with my dolls alone. It was the large ornamental balls that did the trick. It’s not only the intricate compositions and ornaments that Natalya “painted” with wool, but also the perfectly straight vertical and horizontal lines of the flat prototypes, which she managed to preserve in three dimensions. Try making a picture of a house on a ball while keeping the walls perfectly upright! To me, this represents the highest level of craftsmanship.
It’s a great pleasure to know the “Golden Adel” received an award at the exhibition. It means a lot to me, especially because the jury only selected 10 dolls from an enormous number of entries, with around 1,000 artists participating.
It’s hard to say how long it took Natalya to create each ball, as for me, it takes anywhere from three to eight weeks of constant work to create a single doll. Embroidering Adele’s dress alone took a month, while Van Gogh’s doll, in which every element is embroidered—including the band on the hat—took even longer. That’s why we never accept commissions for copies of already existing dolls and we truly appreciate your understanding.
And now for some good news: we’re working on a new collection featuring works inspired by Picasso, Kahlo, Bakst, Mucha, Benois, and Chagall once again. And, this time, the figure from Pablo Picasso’s “Women of Algiers” will be entirely embroidered!
Ekaterina Lipikhina
An artist, journalist, and literary editor, I specialize in art dolls
Instagram - @katia_morethandolls
Website - www.morethandolls.com
