All Dolled Up

Laurie Simmons

Artist Laurie Simmons’ body of work uses dolls to explore themes of feminism, sexuality, body imagery and gender identity. This special portfolio presents a selection of pieces inspired by and referencing movies including Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Little Mermaid and more

by Rochelle Steiner

Critics Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry and Alexandra Schwartz at The New Yorker named 2023 “The Year of the Doll.” They noted how last year’s movies and popular culture brought us worlds filled with dolls transformed into humans (Barbie), women living as dolls (Priscilla), artificially created beings (Poor Things) and the spaces they inhabit. But for visual artist Laurie Simmons this is nothing new. For close to five decades, dolls and their worlds have featured in her work long before our attention turned to Barbie and the like. In Simmons’ words, “While dolls burst into pop culture with the Barbie movie, they have always been there. The last year was less of an explosion and more of an awareness.”

Simmons began her career in the 1970s working with familiar figurines, models and other playthings. As a young girl, she never played with dolls, rejecting Barbie for fashion and boys. In her work, however, dolls provide a way for her to explore consistent themes: women and interior spaces. There are paper dolls and mannequins. A suburban home and other objects sit atop sinuous plastic female legs. More recently, masks, contemporary sex dolls and other avatars have appeared. (With only one exception, Simmons never uses the actual Barbie, but rather what she calls “imitation Barbie.”) She dresses dolls up, creates sets and poses them in various configurations, alone and together—all to photograph them in captivating, thought-provoking images.

Simmons started working at a time when artists (and particularly women artists in New York) turned the camera on themselves and considered their roles in society by looking at images found in popular culture, advertising and the movies. She deployed dolls as surrogates for the female body in highly choreographed examinations of gendered politics. In her early work, dolls performed stereotypically domestic twentieth-century female roles: posing in the kitchen, a dressing room, a teenager’s bedroom and at the pool. On display are markers of her generation, race and class—when the identities of girls and boys, women and men were well inscribed. Her 2006 film The Music of Regret—a puppet musical—was a seriously funny work with dolls standing in for humans. The visual stories she creates deconstruct the interior and exterior lives of women by pointing to—and poking at—femininity, fashion, beauty and architecture.

Over the recent decades, Simmons has looked across cultures and generations, noting shifts in attitude and embracing new technologies. This provides her with expansive and fertile ground to consider representations of women as well as identity and gender more broadly. Cosplay (or “costume play”) and a deep affinity to anime and manga have entered her work through masks, makeup, prosthetics and an array of characters. Here the fluidity of gender, age and identity are on full display. Equally, Simmons embraces the proliferation of digital technology, including AI, which opens a portal into “the interstitial space between human and doll, fact and fiction.” Her range of images of women has expanded to include explorations of skin tone, body type, transgenders and hyperreal surrogates.

What might at one point have seemed like—and, if so, been mistaken for—a nostalgic reinforcement of gender norms with female dolls appearing in the kitchen has been upended by Simmons’s voracious experimentation. Her feminist lens is consistently pointed towards the complexity of women, from body image to eating disorders to pornography to nonconforming gender and gender misidentification.

Poised in the roles we assume—in life, art, fashion and in the movies—Simmons’ dolls reveal the fluidity of feminism today.