From the time I first found my own voice as an artist I have mostly used plastic toys and figures in staged settings to create tableaux vivants in which I seek my own stories and invite the viewer to find his or her own. My art is based on imagination and at its heart you will find story-telling, play and mystery. In the earliest times humans believed that souls or spirits existed in every object, even if it was inanimate. From this, it was a small jump of intuition to think that if you fashioned a human-like object it could possess the soul of ancestors or beings with supernatural powers who might act on your behalf. The mystical belief in the power of effigies continues to this day. Modern dolls, made of plastic, and manufactured by the millions can cast a similar spell. It is not hard to think that they possess lives of their own and are the repositories of unknown consciousness. A child playing with a doll also attributes a personality to it. I think many children play with dolls in subversive and perverse ways, they do not limit themselves to what is intended by the manufacturer or the society that produced the object. I approach dolls in the same way. In our society these figures (toys, dolls) are loaded with meaning but in my work they are also personalities who exist as bodies and souls around which I weave mysteries and parodies. Thus my photographs revolve around the interaction of the known (society), the unknown (the anima of the dolls), and the imagined.
