Barbie-zare

By Anna Radchenko 

I met Anna after a quite boring lecture, I was about to go but she stopped me and asked me where she could found the dolls necklace I was wearing (so at the end i was happy i went to that boring lecture!) 

We decided to make a collaboration together and I felt her dark and romantic universe will fit perfectly with my dolls in order to create a more gloomy  and melancholic atmosphere. I find her picture really "cinematographic", you can imagine a story behind each still image. For me, there is something hard to define about  the"Russian soul" and her model look like postmodern Thekhov's character. 

http://www.annaradchenko.com/ 

For this bracelet I had to "sacrifice" 12 barbies, to take only the face. I feel a bit like the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter or Bluebeard.  

It's a bit like in the horror  movie "Eyes without a face"  where the heroïn's  face was horribly disfigured in an automobile accident and where the crazy doctor Dr. Génessier's unsuccessful attempt to graft her face onto his daughter's.

Originally, this barbie dress was a theatre costume for my play "Fernand" that I presented in the Platform theatre of Central Saint Martins as my final degree show. 

I like the idea that it's a theatre costume could be used again for a photo-shot. That it is part of story but also can be used independently in another context and generates new narratives. 

This play is dedicated to my favourite place in the world where i find everything I need for my costumes and jewels since I'm 8 years old. 

"It deserves credit...Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day… I like to give a chance to objects, it's a bit like people you know, just take them how they are. 

You know, I’ve been coming here since I was  8 years old, I love this place, I feel I belong  here in a way, I never know what i'm looking for and what I'm going to bring back home. I don't like objects that you buy in "real" stores, which smell  like brand new plastic. I prefer them a bit dirty, a bit battered by life, they have a soul. They are still part of a story,  A slice of life. You are taking part in a lucky dip  but it's the find which jumps to your eyes, with the tremendous power of a chip pan  splattering in the school playground . The find has poetic beauty that shyly skims across our arm.  It doesn't matter if it's a "valuable" object or a “one-pound purchase". The found  object is not the one that you keep inside a showcase, that you lock up and  look through the haze of your breath on glass. 

The find, as the name suggests is playing hide and seek. But it's the object who finds us and surprise us, shouting “BOO!” like a sadistic older cousin hiding behind the curtain. You could dream it but you can't design it properly in you mind in advance. It populates the cave of our dreams in the little mermaid kingdom.They are traces of a lost world, a past world, souvenirs that you can bring back from a trip in a time machine. The find moves us. It arouses nostalgia of ourselves. You know, in French we say for a painting with fruits and objects " nature morte" a dead life, but in English it's a still life" Objects have their own life.  they echo each other, break each other,  dismember each other. They make their own system of signs like words that combine and recombine themselves in a poem. I'm hunting the unexpected like the pirate is hunting  treasure.  Life …a constant adventure." 

Wearing the lego necklace as a lucky charm on stage! 

In my play,  performers are more functions than real characters, theatre makers rather than actors, craftsmen of a fable who resorts  to the old tricks  and props of theatre - a pre-recorded voice on a old telephone, a chair that becomes a car, an empty  luggage- to build the fiction at the same time that Fernand is telling his story on the screen.

 Because the story is true, nothing need to be pretended or concealed . The charity shops becomes a church, a sugar cane field, a train station over the course of his adventures.  This transformable set open possibilities and  recycles itself like theses second-hands objects which find  second life within Fernand's hands.  Sourced directly in the street and in  trash,  i collected it as an urban gleaner who just have to bend down to collect the leftover of society.  Raw material on which the imagination of the audience can project the story. A "poor theatre" where having nothing becomes a strength and pushes us to be resourceful  and creative, like in the process of this play,  only made with the wonderful energy of being alive.  

Next to my dear wooden Eiffel tower that I saw, heartbroken in the bin of my school last week…wish i could have bring it back home… 

Georgina Leopardova, a promising art director, organised this photoshoot, inspired by tim walker aesthetic with the really talented photographer Lorenzo Cisi who was able to  recreate this dark fairy tale atmosphere even with frozen hands! 

By Lorenzo Cisi 

Hanna Gaskin,  the make up artist made this amazing make up inspired by 2007 japanese Dior fashion show to create a kind of gothic Geisha. 

From our Facebook conversation  when we were talking about the concept: 

" Just want to create an illusion that even you are not from this world. Because you and your dolls belong to somewhere else". 

By Lorenzo Cisi

We went to Hyde Park on one of the coldest day of the year -and barbies look good but don't keep you warm! 

Mood board: Tim walker elfin and disturbing atmosphere 

Visionaries

I met Sue Kreitzman at her exhibition Dare to Wear in november, an amazing event, where you don't know if the piece of art are the actual works exhibited  or the people watching and performing around. I immediately fall in love with Sue's universe, and she asked me to made a necklace for her, which as an honour. I wanted to make something  especially for Sue the way i see her and the way she inspiring and influence me in my own work. 

"My work is completely untutored (as far as technique and materials are concerned, I make it up as I go along), intensely personal and involves colour, food, freedom and the female landscape. I fashion imagined Goddesses, glimpsed strangers, close friends, my personal female heroines, real and mythological - Josephine Baker, Frida Kahlo, Eve, Medusa - and self-portraits, and I adorn these powerful female images with profound symbols crafted from junk."   I am deeply moved by primitive religious and tribal art of all kinds. Images and objects that have been created with passion take on immense power."

 http://www.suekreitzman.com/

So I tried to reflect her love for baroque and profusion of elements.  You can find a lot of references to surrealism, especially to Dali, for the lobster and for the flower head lady. Also lot of syncretism references, with a oriental Godess next to a Jesus medal. 

For the basis I cut the shape in wood with a jigsaw, then i spray-painted it in carmine (Sue's colour!). To protect the table of my kitchen I used some fashion magazines and i like the red splashes on the Chanel ad,  as if this necklace was a kind of slaughter in the fashion world! 

 

It's interesting to talk with people about your work  because you have your own references  like Dali for the lobster but someone is going to tell you - oh i though you where inspired by John Waters 's Multiplied Maniac  movie where the drag queen Devine is attacked by a giant lobster! 

It was quite a slow  creative process, the necklace took me two month to be made. I didn't have a  preexisting design, for the necklace. Everything come from necessity, I started from what i had and what i found. Like Sue "Half my time is spent obsessively trawling for junk, and the other half, obsessively putting it all together." I feel like an hermit crab who doesn't build his shell from scratch but take over abandoned one and make it his own by adapting it. 

The base of the necklace  was on my mannequin in my room  and i was adding or taking something back every day.  

But the process is not random. Every elements are connected to one another. For example, the flower lady had to be next to the barbie kissing Ken because of the shape of the body, who was entailing the lobster-body next to it. 

Dali's flower head/ Lady Gaga inspired by Dali

The pearl legs,where the  hardest thing to make technically,to make them moving like a mobile. I found my inspiration from the  golden barbie chandelier she has in her house. 

Game of spot the difference- i one picture legs are up, in the other legs are down. What i like in this necklace is everything is movable, it's always different because you can change the position of arms and legs, and look at it through different angles! 

I guess I was influenced by my trip to India, sticking a lot of bindies i bring from there, which are creating kind of  three-dimensional tattoos. 

With this necklace i wanted to show that reality is not fixed but "transformable". You can transform and  recreate your own version of barbie who is a mass product. They all have the same body and the same silly smile. But on my necklace, Ken kissing barbie has a woman body and his wearing a really kitsch and cheesy Jesus necklace, A woman has a child face and a crocodile tail, or a flower head. You can decorate or customise barbie, putting bindies on her face or strass on her eyebrows. 

This necklace is like a jewel  fresco, a syncretic Sixtine Chapel or a sculptural comic strip where every signal detail tells you a story. It's a bit like a "where is wally?" book where you can't get the whole picture in one time. For example there is a  stuffed  trophy crocodile which the tail is coming out from a barbie body, or an  indian goddess is eating an ice-cream. 

For the private view, I was wearing a dolls and barbies dress and people had always the impression to talk to several persons at the same time "i'm really happy to meet you with your dolls".

this little girl was quite stress when i looked at her barbies, i think she was afraid she will end up beheaded on my dress! 

With Rascal Devine who is making amazing and colourful vintage jewels! (etsy.com/shop/idahoreds).

My necklace in Sue's house, perfectly matches with it's environment. Sue's house it's a kind of Disney land for adult!