BY Alison Gillmor

Change the scale and you change everything. This idea is given unsettling confirmation in Diana Thorneycroft’s Doll Mouth Series, which features extreme close-ups of the lips of plastic baby dolls. Viewed from a safe and sane distance, the subjects might seem cute, possibly kitschy. But as the camera obsessively homes in on the dolls’

pink and fleshy orifices, these images develop a dark psychosexual resonance.

Drawn to probing the vulnerabilities of the body, the Winnipeg-based Thorneycroft has often used dolls as proxies. She has inserted child-friendly toys and cartoon characters into scenes of torture and violence in meticulous pencil-on-paper drawings. She has scarred, marked and mutilated the smooth and impermeable skins of dolls in mixed-media installations. In photo-based works she has combined her own body with dolls to create enigmatic black-and-white tableaux that are permeated with psychic and physical dread. Always, the body is represented as a welter of instincts, a repository of half-remembered traumas, a site of disintegration and disease. The Doll Mouth works, c-print photographs produced in 71.1 x 71.1 cm or 101.6 x 101.6 cm formats, are less explicit than much of Thorneycroft’s art — the 1999 exhibition Monstrance used decomposing rabbits to comment on cultural responses to death —

but the final effect is undeniably disturbing.

The notion that dolls can be creepy has long been exploited in old campfire tales and B-grade horror movies. In 1970 the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori advanced the Uncanny Valley theory to suggest that human facsimiles like robots and dolls, which come close to looking like human beings but don’t quite succeed, tend to provoke feelings of revulsion. The dolls are disconcerting because they exist in an uneasy limbo: they are close replicas of flesh but not flesh itself. Thorneycroft heightens the eerie effect by focussing, with tight formal control, on the dolls’ lips. Referencing Barbara Kruger’s description of the mouth as the place where “the dry outside meets the wet inside,”

Thorneycroft transforms these hard, fixed plastic mouths into fragile portals, poised for fulfillment or violation, pleasure or pain. Using the mechanics of enticement to convey deeply disconcerting content, Thorneycroft puts the viewer in an impossible position, one that is made even queasier by the fact that dolls are both representations of children and the playthings of children.

Thorneycroft is very clear when she discusses the Doll Mouth works: the images have not been altered in any way. Thorneycroft’s shrewd manipulation of scale is enough to bring out latent meanings. A piece like Doll Mouth (little tongue), with its mobile pink mouth and clitoral tongue, seems to make outrageously obvious parallels to the sexual organs, reminding us that the term “labial”

refers to both lips and genitalia. Doll mouth (with hair) also seems overtly sexual, in a completely off-putting way. With its grimy, crusted orifice, red rash, and aggressively magnified hair, it could be a medical illustration, a dire warning about the intertwined nature of sex and disease.

At a straightforward sociological level, the Doll Mouth Series can be read as a critique of the hyper-sexualisation of young girls. The fact that Thorneycroft’s chosen subjects are not overtly tarted-up toys suggests the depth of this dynamic. These dolls are not Barbies, with their tiny waists, conical breasts and impossibly long legs. They are not Barbie’s 21st-century rivals, the big-lipped, big-booted Bratz girls, who dress like working prostitutes (even though they’re marketed at pre-tweens). Thorneycroft’s subjects are infant dolls —

supposedly innocuous, innocent babes in arms, designed to instil in little girls the dutiful responses of motherhood. So where do these wet, crimson lips and languid pouts come from? Why do so many of these images give off an aura of seductive sauciness?

Thorneycroft is knowingly tapping into a history of mixed messages. Consider photographs of children in the Victorian period, which to their contemporary audience functioned as sincere tributes to rosy complexions, bonny curls and the angelic nature of childhood. To the post-Freudian eye these same images — such as the nude and semi-nude depictions of children seen in the photographs of Alice in Wonderland author Charles Dodgson —

often possess an icky sexual vibe. Or think of Marilyn Monroe, whose shrewd understanding of how to seduce the camera was perfected in a characteristic pose of sleepy eyelids and a soft, open mouth. On the one hand, Monroe suggested knowingness and endless sexual availability. On the other, she achieved the innocent aura of the child-woman, eternally vulnerable and needy.

Under the sociological reading of Thorneycroft’s work runs an even more ambivalent level of possible psychological meanings. Dolls’ lips and eyes might flirt with the viewer, but these sexual signals are contradicted by the blank space between their legs. As Steven Matijcio suggests in a 2005 catalogue essay for the exhibition of the Doll Mouth Series at the Rodman Hall Arts Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario, Thorneycroft’s work probes the tension between two societal attitudes. There is a tendency in our culture to view babies as disembodied cherubs, denying the intense physicality of infancy, particularly as it connects to Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages. At the same time, there is a vicious propensity to layer adult devices and desires onto images of children, a trend that slides from the sleaziness of child beauty pageants toward the brutality of child pornography. By isolating and magnifying the mouths of dolls, the works clearly represent the oral stage of infant development, when all need is reduced to the instinctive action of the mouth on the mother’s breast. But they also creep uncomfortably close to the visuals of an “All Oral” hardcore porn site. In Doll Mouth (laughing), the subject’s odd, up-tilted angle, the mouth-centred composition and spooky lighting lead the image toward a nauseating confusion — babyish helplessness meets a calculated posture of sexual submission.

If this seems like an overreaction, it’s interesting to note how the dolls split along gender lines. The truly beautiful mouths — voluptuous whorls and intricate rosebuds in moist lipstick colours of dramatic fuchsia or delicate petal pink — all belong to girl dolls, whose images read as passive and receptive. The boy dolls — Thorneycroft identifies them as boys by their clothing, which is sometimes out of frame — are thin-lipped and active. Doll Mouth (red plaid), for instance, seems to be yowling, his little white teeth adding a sharp edge to his imperious infant demands. It’s significant that in Thorneycroft’

s collection the only dolls with teeth are boys.

Thorneycroft finds her dolls by happenstance in flea markets, Value Village stores and garage sales. Sometimes she’s drawn to Kewpie-doll stylization — the exaggerated comic curve of clown lips; the mouth that is reduced to a tiny, surprised-looking ‘o;’

the stretched-out yawn that distorts into a vaginal opening. But she also finds a perverse appeal in hyper-realism, as with the pruned newborn lips of Doll Mouth (infant), a replica doll used in prenatal classes.

Thorneycroft started working on Doll Mouth photographs in 2002 and produced most of the series in 2004, shooting with a Mamiya RZ67. Unfortunately, the tungsten film she uses for the series has been discontinued, and she now hoards her remaining stock and scours eBay for new supplies. Thorneycroft photographs the dolls in total darkness with a flashlight, which accounts for the looming, expressionistic contrasts of shadow and light. This technique tends to convert the anatomies of the dolls’

faces into almost abstract topographies of curves and planes and to concentrate attention on the mouth. The square format also works against the conventional figure-on-ground composition of portraiture, de-emphasizing the rest of the face and again bringing the gaze back to the mouth.

Thorneycroft has tried photographing dolls with a digital camera but has never managed to replicate her original results. She especially misses the way the old-school shooting method brings out intangible, unexpected results. Thorneycroft doesn’

t clean the dolls, and the extreme close-ups often reveal hidden patterns of dirt, dust and hair, almost like buried feelings of sexual disgust and shame rising reluctantly to the surface.

Perhaps one of the unanticipated effects in the Doll Mouth Series, however, considering the homeliness of much of the source material, is the sheer beauty of many of these images. Doll Mouth (torn tongue), which depicts a doll with a fabric tongue that is starting to unravel, is a gorgeous piece, the cool Art Deco colour pairing of magenta and chartreuse rising up in waves. Doll Mouth (beautiful) — the title probably comes from the fact that Thorneycroft considers this one of the most beautiful photographs she has ever taken — has a striking visual purity. The deep red of the mouth is balanced by the blurred grey of the doll’

s clothes, and the composition is simple, symmetrical and carefully pared down.

In the end, it’s the beauty that disturbs the most. Thorneycroft’s concentrated formalism, her insistent repetition of motif, and her manipulation of scale combine to create a controlled visual structure that is at odds with the unruly psychosexual currents of the subject. Attraction and repulsion mix into curdled eroticism, and we’

re forced to confront uncomfortable ideas about sexuality and art.