WIDN blog
Dollhouses
March 05, 2009
By Emma Gritt
Rachel Whiteread – Place (2008)
I’m yet to work out if it’s the fact I look like Chucky from Child’s Play or that I am 5’10 that makes me yearn to be a doll. Perhaps it’s that everything would be so much easier if I was doll sized. I would get carried around or hitch a lift in secret places or on the backs of cats (I’m very lazy) and I would like to think I’d have a killer bod like Barbie. But thinking about Barbie with Chucky’s face on top is slightly gross so let’s just assume I’d be a generic squashy doll shape.
I went to the Hayward Gallery’s Psycho Buildings exhibition last year, and really liked Rachel Whiteread’s piece called Place (2008). It was a town of dollhouses lit from the inside, creating the effect that you had stumbled across some sort of miniscule township (pictured above).
Whiteread collected the dollhouses over 20 years, and each of them had been handmade. She said at the time: “Personally, I see them as containing a great deal of pathos, as extremely sad, interesting and sympathetic objects. Some of them are really bashed up. They’re made by dads, uncles, grannies and grandpas – who ever wanted to get involved in making them – in the garden shed.”
Dollhouses may seem to be a childish pursuit, but their history dates back to the 17th century when they were in the form of cabinet houses. The wealthy would often have a replica house in a cabinet to show to friends and guests, and it was an expensive hobby.
Cabinet dollhouse with furnishings c1870 - c1920
If you could design the inside of a small house to look like your dream home, would you? Here's a doll version of me thinking it over.
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