Every so often, as an admirer of dolls, one encounters images or objects that arrest one's attention and refuse to let go. They change one's notions about what is possible in the medium of doll-making, and they reverberate with some deep aesthetic chord in oneself as the viewer. Far from evoking a simple possessive urge ("I want this doll"), they demand reflection.
Such was my immediate impression of Angel Egg New Dentelle the first time I saw her with the Carousel Total Look. Her Rococo Blue and Pink Pearl iterations are also beautiful. With New Dentelle, Marmite-Sue confronts me with a doll whose enchanting loveliness is tinged with the frightening. She looks gentle, graceful-- her lips are slightly parted, as if she would speak, think, or breathe. Her legs are threaded with ribbons, like fine stockings. Her body is covered with frills and flowers, like lace. She seems like the perfect antique automaton, wanting only a music box heart to animate her.
In Rococo Blue, AE Dentelle is feather-light, as perfectly powdered as a confection by Boucher, and as elegant as a room as in the Hotel de Soubise. In Pink Pearl, AE Dentelle is subtle and soft, her pearlescence reminding me of the pair of ceramic peacocks that my paternal grandmother has owned since the 1950s. I remember them as sudden burst of florid femininity in a sea of mid-century neutral geometrics. In Carousel, AE Dentelle is a marvel of pink, green, and gold. Like the old-fashioned fair carousels from which Marmite-Suite takes inspiration, AE Dentelle is a spectacle of dizzying fantasy. She is artifice harnessed to delight.
Yet, just as a very young child may be overwhelmed with the lights, music, and unstoppable motion of a carousel when she loses sight of her parents in the crowds, so does AE Dentelle suggest something a little dark behind her pretty colours, floral ornaments, and satin ribbons.
As Freud (of course) tells us, the uncanny appears when something from a repressed psychic state returns. This doubled thing from the past reminds us of a time when dreams were nigh indistinguishable from reality, when the world was full of unaccountable powers, and death seemed porous. A toy might come to life, or a corpse might stir of its own accord. We thought we might stay young forever and marry a charming prince. Yet the stripped bone of a skull, or the un-aging face of a doll reminds us both of our younger selves, frightened of monsters in the dark, and of our mundane, hopeless frailty.
Beneath Marmite-Sue's magical painting and ribbons, New AE Dentelle is white like bone china. Her flower-detailing looks like scarring, or the naturally adorned skeleton of the Crystal Maiden in the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave. The holes for her ribbons gape like puncture wounds. Her chest is a hollow, dark space. Nor can we forget that, following the French Terror, a red ribbon around the neck became a sign of remembrance after the bloody excesses of the guillotine, which makes AE Dentelle's bruised, Rococo Blue version all the more ghostly.
At every point I consider, AE Dentelle's prettiness finds a correlation in violence. To make the female body into a true spectacle of decorative fantasy, to make the function of ornament follow the form of a young lady, to leave no part untouched by artifice, is to do mortal damage.
And still, AE Dentelle is beautiful. She is beautiful because artifice is also freedom from the confines of the natural. Marmite-Sue has cast her in resin and strung her with elastic and silicon. Having never lived, AE Dentelle will never die. Instead, the imaginations of her beholders will give her exquisite presence a multitude of meanings and identities.
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