At Miniatura, I received a sad package. In a plastic bag were the remnants of one of my fairies, who had been through a washing machine, by mistake, in a pocket.
Absolutely do not do this, at all. The fairy had been bought for a young collector. None of the dolls I make are intended for children, there are signs all over the stand telling you this. Nothing I make has ever passed any tests as being suitable for children. Nevertheless some owners are young. I am not surprised. I have not made very sophisticated dolls and do not plan to do so. My attraction to the world of the miniature, from the outset, was because of its innocence.
There have been doll makers who have specialised in the depiction of lust, of age, of assorted sorts of misery, of haughtiness and many other unattractive human attributes. For me the whole point of miniaturising the world is to escape from the more awful aspects of humanity. I always aim to make something you would like to pick up and cuddle. It’s one of the reasons I do Miniatura rather than any other show.
So my dolls do often end up belonging to children, who form relationships with them specifically because giving your love to a doll who cannot tell you off, who will always smile at you and be happy, is a safe emotion in a dangerous world.
The fairy, who had been carried everywhere in a pocket, ended up in the washing machine and was retrieved very broken. Happily the head was intact, the loops had stayed in the hands and feet, the eyes had stayed set with plaster of Paris and all the china painted features were as good as new.
I was very interested. I do tell customers that porcelain dolls will last and that china painting becomes part of the porcelain but it was interesting to see how well the parts of the doll had endured.
I should not have been surprised. In the eighteenth century there was an explosion of porcelain factories in England. We know of about twenty nine by the surviving wares. Most of them did not last because of intense competition, the difficulty of producing the required quality and all the technical considerations. In short, all the problems I’ve encountered over the last thirty three years of production.
We know where some of the vanished factories were by their wasters. Wasters are the bits that turned out wonky, the ones where the colours fired very strangely, some where the handles dropped off and some that looked like a good idea but turned out plain awful. I do know all about this, some days I make nothing but wasters.
What I do with my wasters is to fill plastic divided boxes with them. What the eighteenth century factories did was to chuck them in heaps in the yard where the weather and time eventually buried the waste dumps. However, long term readers (hello! Nice to see you!) know that one of the joys of all ceramics is their enduring nature. We know of a group of people called the Beaker people who lived across Europe five and a half thousand years ago, even though they left no literature, stories, dwellings or other marks of civilisation. Guess how we know?
Correct! The museum here has several beakers. It is an amazement to see ceramic drinking vessels that have been buried in the earth for five and a half thousand years, which you could still drink from (given a gallon of disinfectant.)
I have an entire cupboard full of wasters. The smaller I go the more wasters I make. In the latest, the little gargoyles
are fourteen pieces of porcelain, which look big in this picture but are actually just over two inches tall, you can hide them in the palm of your hand if you fold your fingers.
Yet the loop of every foot has to fit inside the hollow calf, the hand inside the wrists and so on for thirteen joints. Inside the kiln, parts placed nearer to the elements will heat faster and, potentially, distort more than items placed in the middle of a shelf.
The actual shelf is the size of a serving dish. You can appreciate how small the parts are.
The gargoyles have tolerances of mere millimetres to make the feet fit in the ankles and so on. When working with the clay, prior to firing, if I make the hole in the body where the thigh joins, unequal on either side of the body, the poor doll will have a built-in limp. Then there are all the wire loops that looked OK going in but fired with bits of wire sticking out..
which is why I make this many bits at a time in the hope of having a few that are perfect.
Or, to put it another way, why I make so many wasters.
Which is how, by trawling through dozens of little plastic boxes and dismantling another doll, I managed to mend the fairy.
I do say at shows, that because my dolls are made in the traditional way, that any museum that has Victorian dolls will be able to mend or restore them once I’ve gone.
This is true but it will have to be a very clever museum, probably.
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