The Eerie and Beautiful Dolls Françoise Duvivier

Another doll artist I came across probably around the the same time I found shadow box maker Dusty Gernard. As a person who has made dolls when I see work by someone who makes dolls like 
Françoise Duvivier it needs to be told so others can see what she creates. 


From France, Françoise Duvivier is a collage artist with a curious passion for dolls. She is best known for the often violent imagery in her collages, which have been collected into a book Dive/Duvivier: Works (a limited edition book released by Italy's Minus Habens Press). Duvivier's dolls are handmade, eerie, ritualistic and precious. Typically her dolls appear aged, with shriveled skin and tortured faces. They are nevertheless lovingly dressed in strange clothes of mourning, recalling past days in a simpler world, a world where superstition was still a thing of power. A collection of nine of Duvivier's dolls were presented, chosen from amongst dozens of completed works.




The Devotional Art of Francoise Duvivier (from SENSORIA FROM CENSORIUM Magazine): "Francoise Duvivier...devotes her considerable talents to crafting skillful and disarming works of art. A prolific collage artist and former small-press publisher of the impressive magazine METRO RIQUET, Francoise also crafts exquisite hand-made dolls. Each doll is imbued with a touching, at times disquieting humanity, fashioned with subtly and photographed by Francoise with a tender, candid bleakness that reveals the talents of a complex and sophisticated artist. "I remember my first doll I made myself when I was a child & shy; I was far away from home in the Big Garden. It was a creature made of a bottle cork, and two tree branches and a piece of fabric, and it was my first friend."




Partial Artist Statement from the Lazarus Corporation
"In a controlled and supposedly normal world, it is impossible to live without making big concessions in order to survive, one day to die "empty." As an artist, I want to express this smothering and to parody it in all its paroxysm through my art work. It is a direct language wich speaks deeply about our primitive agitation."


From her site Damaged Corpse
"The dementia dolls give me a feeling of old rituals, like being reminded of something ancient and buried-but also new and just born? Something beautiful, but hidden, a thing that should be buried in a grave, but has emerged to climb the trees. Strange. Spooky. Like a memory that never goes away, always looking down upon you."

More of her exquisite dolls

The Doll House (1999).