Gifted Originals

This may or may not come as a surprise, but Gifted Originals loves toys. We love old, new, modern, educational, and traditional toys, however, we do sometimes get spooked out how certain toys can get stranger as the years go by.

Case in point would be the new exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood. Instead of looking for inspiration from the outside, photographer Craig Deane delved into the museum storage cabinets whereby he found drawers full of tiny torsos, chubby limbs, waxy heads, unblinking glass eyes and once-fashionable miniature outfits. Around 8,000 dolls from by-gone days populate these drawers, and according to Esther Lutman, the curator of Britain’s largest public doll archive, there are 100,000 items in total here – too many to be displayed in the museum cabinets.

Making good use of the toys in the basement, the photographer has selected 35 of the brightest dolls. The Telegraph writes, ‘Brilliantly lit, blown up to one-metre-high and composed much like the artless crop of a police mugshot, the photographs draw you in and ask you to scrutinise the expressions on the faces of these figures that we might have once loved, or given to our children to love.’

Talking about how he got the dolls to strike the perfect pose, Deane said, “The result was really surprising,” he says. “I found that if you arrange the face so it looks directly down the lens it becomes transformed into something more engaging than an inanimate object. It becomes a portrait.”

If you’re thinking it’s all a bit weird, then we’re afraid you’re wrong. Apparently, the desire to bring a doll’s face to life surely stems from a human impulse that goes back centuries. To project an imagined reality on to our dolls is a habit that children pick up before they even learn to talk.

If Gifted Originals is in the vicinity, then we’ll see to it that we pop down to the V&A for the exhibition, which starts on September 3rd.