In the You Can't Get There From Here installation I tackle the notion of beauty and what it means to us. Barbie’s were launched in 1959, the first adult bodied doll, before most children’s toy dolls were representations of infants. Barbie dolls are something I used to loath, their intended look of perfection, of fashion model, the perfect female, thin, tall, happy, attractive, everything in the right place and of correct proportions – awful, un-natural and misleading! How can an object like a Barbie doll be reconciled with the real world? Maybe 1% of real women look like Barbie’s, so that means 99% of Barbie’s are missing the mark. Real people have a past, a history, they have scars, problems, are imperfect and they have personalities, neither I felt can be found in a Barbie, she hasn’t lived through anything. I wondered what could be done to them to make them look more real, less tarty, more human. When I think of us humans I often get the feeling that the longer we live the more weight we carry around with us, mentally and physically and I wanted the dolls to gain personality through carrying weight on their all so perfect bodies, like a cross you have to drag around with you where-ever you go. Years ago a friend of mine made an egg box out of concrete by filling an empty egg carton with a mix of sand, water and cement. When it was quite dry he peeled the carton cast off the concrete negative and was left with a heavy full bodied pretend egg box. At the time I was slightly perplexed with the sculptural form and didn’t know where to place it and what it was ‘useful’ for, or ‘what it said’- I was puzzled and intrigued by its uselessness. This kind of uselessness was ideal for adding weight to the dolls as ‘their baring cross’. When you put the 200 barbies together in a circle, row upon row, perhaps 8/9 rows high, head and hair on the outside, legs and feet on the inside, it gives you the impression of a well, or fountain. The outside is quite colourful due to the different hair colors, the inside looks like a vortex, or plane turbine, or large carnivorous plant. I like the idea of multiplying one particular object and by putting these many same objects together, creating a new shape, a new object.
