Dollhouse Paintings Gallery Rooms in the brain where fantasy lives as an anecdote to lonliness.

I have always been obsessed with miniatures. Perfect, tiny replicas of the material possessions we desire in real life. The fine china. The silverware. The Victorian furniture.

I had a dollhouse as a kid that meant everything to me, and I spent hours rearranging that tiny furniture and removing the little rugs to vacuum them. I created my own fantasy life for my dolls.

I didn’t like being a kid. I was impatient to grow up and navigate my own life. So the dollhouse was a means of creating my own interior landscape.

Now consider the small percentage of adult women who still have dollhouses they build and furnish which represent aspects of a dream life.

My own aunt was one of these women, living in a doll-world which she preferred to the harshness of real life. I got all of my miniatures from her, and she taught me what they meant.

I inherited more of these pieces a few years ago after my grandmother died and a box of tiny furniture was found in the attic. There was something about these familiar objects that haunted me, the cans of miniature Campbell’s soup glued into a cupboard, a hairbrush stuck onto a vanity table, bottles of soda in the refrigerator. Symbols of ordinary life which comforted someone too reclusive to have a normal life of her own.

Dusty, weathered, chipped…I began the dollhouse paintings to represent rooms in the brain where fantasy lives as an anecdote to loneliness.