Doll’s Houses

From the mid 1970s I worked on a series of Doll Houses. I wanted to take the idea of a child’s toy and turn it into an adult one, full of inner landscapes for the psyche rather than house furnishings. Each house contained ‘scenarios’ happening in the different rooms.

The first house I created was the Exorcism House, depicting scenes related to the topics of the Exorcism collage series. The Bird House was covered in feathers, showing inside intimate and surreal couplings with our feathered friends. The Red House is wallpapered with a collage of images drawn from my collection of erotica and peopled with collage cuts outs, dolls and snakes. Its my doll whore house of a thousand and one fantasies.

Ganesh House (Money House) is covered in snakeskin and its three floors within are dedicated to the roll of the dice, the spin of the roulette wheel, the flip of the coin that is the game of life, the game of fortune. Currency from many cultures of the world which I collected forms part of the assemblage, a life cast of open hands in the center.

Dakini House is my Tantric house, where the seven life casts of my head (atop ‘stupas’), fully establish that the house is a symbol for the body. In this case, the body of Tantra where each room is related to the color of a different chakra, or energy center within the subtle body. My dolls here become ‘dakinis’, feminine embodyments of these energies, connected to their elements.