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. Read more