The notion of dolls having a magical, ethereal power
and a central role in spiritual belief is one that has captivated the
artist Michel Nedjar.
As a child, he would make dolls out of rags, bits of his sister’s dolls
and other found objects. Sometimes he would bury them, unearthing them
sometime later in a state of decomposition. He became conscious of his
Jewish history and heritage in the early 1960s when he saw a film
regarding the Holocaust on television. This, along with a period of
tuberculosis which nearly cost him his life, had a profound affect on
him. During the
1970s he travelled to Mexico, Belize and Guatemala where he became
consumed with
the ritualistic, talismanic nature of their dolls, particularly those
associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead. He began to make dolls
influenced by his experiences on his return to Paris. Nedjar originally
trained as a tailor, and he constructs large dolls from scraps of
fabric or schmattès and paper picked up at Paris’ Porte de
Clignancourt
flea market. He uses stitching to bind the rags together and dips the
forms in a mixture of earth,
glue and plaster. His almost mummified dolls, with deformed limbs and
faces are reminiscent of the pagan, and clearly cross the boundaries of
what has generally been
deemed acceptable in modern western aesthetics. It is this
contravention that Nedjar wishes to highlight. The dolls seem
brutalised, deathly and oppressed, reflecting the human suffering of
the twentieth century,
but, in fact, they have fundamentally magical and ethereal qualities.
Nedjar
feels that his dolls have a spirit and journey of their own. He
invests them
with his own spirituality, much like the Asante people, the Vodou faith
and
many other cultures and religions that invest these three dimensional
human representations, or dolls, with mysticism, magic and divinity.
Suzie Plumb & Jackie Lewis, extract from introduction — Guys ‘n’
dolls — exhibition
catalogue, Brighton, England, 2005
(exhibition — Guys 'n' dolls — Brighton, England — April 22 to
June 12
2005)
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