Audience members take notes and check out a slide-show
“Catharsis & Projection: A Roundtable on Non-Oedipal Psychologies and a Doll-Making Workshop” was a smashing success last Tuesday. Fun, interesting, generative, and filled with smart ideas and lovely crafts. (If you’re curious, you can see a PDF of the program here.)
Clare Wilson, a doctoral student in History and Medieval Studies here at the GC, gave a fabulous presentation (and show-and-tell!) about how collectors of ball-jointed dolls become co-creators in their own right through customization. Collectors not only select their dolls’ basic appearances, but even add tattoos, scarification, cyborg body-parts, etc.:
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Clare’s show & tell of ball-jointed dolls . . .
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. . . to a captivated audience . . .
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. . . included wonderfully creepy mix-n-match faces.
Gwendolyn Shaw — a doctoral student in Art History at the GC — explored the fascinating and bizarrely neglected sexual violence of Hans Bellmer’s Lustmord dolls. (We are very grateful to Gwen for liaising between 3Text and the Feminist Studies Group, Art History program, and Women’s Studies concentration.)
Gwen’s worry dolls in the clutches of Brian’s butterfly monster.
In the workshop portion of the evening, Gwen made some beautiful, old-school worry dolls, seen here (to the left) posed in in a starlight tableau with Brian Witoszynski’s butterfly monster:
Elise Zucker, assistant professor of English at Hostos, discussed the centrality of projection and role-reversal in the psychotic degeneration of the main character of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, while Judd Staley — GC doctoral student in English — gave a fascinating and convincing close-reading of Kleinian elements in the the Prankquean episode of Finnigans Wake (there he is below):
Judd about to devour a doll he decorated for his son Henry. What would Melanie Klein say?!
Finally, Alec Magnet (that is to say, me!), doctoral candidate in English at the GC, talked about Yojo, Queequeg’s phallic/infantile little idol in Moby-Dick, as a relational intermediary between him and Ishmael. I compared it to Eve Sedgwick’s meditations on what she calls “queer little gods” in Cavafy and Proust, as well as to her own fiber art practices, in order to explore how Yojo allows Melville’s characters both to navigate their complicated feelings for each other and to experience what Sedgwick calls “the middle ranges of agency” — a state each character desires, in which subject and object cannot be clearly divided from each other.
T Meyerhoff (also a doctoral candidate in English at the GC) moderated a lively, fruitful, and engaging discussion.
Following the roundtable, audience, presenters, and new guests all gathered around the crafting tables to make their own catharsis and projection dolls. Here are some of the fabulous results:
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Cathartic mermaid by Annie Cranstoun
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T Meyerhoff’s shadow/ghost (a work in progress)
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“Bonehead” by Clare Wilson
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Carolina and her fabulous, technicolor catharsis-doll!
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Sharon Bogart’s CHARM-ing projection doll (front) . . .
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. . . I apologise for the terrible pun (back)
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Anne Donlon’s elegant clothespin dolls
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Alec’s diptych (inside) — not a doll at all!
Thanks so much to our presenters, audience, crafters, and friends for a wonderful event — the capstone to a wonderful semester! Keep a look-out for our schedule of informal crafting sessions over the winter break. And, GC students, please sign our roster!
UPDATE: The Majestic Mme Matilde Moutarde, by Chrissy Nadler
Text Textile Texture Studio 