In my print-based installation entitled The Disobedient Dollhouse (2009-10), I recreated the highly-detailed interiors of a Victorian-style dollhouse, but with a surreal, subversive twist. For instance, although the conventional Victorian domestic scene of a woman playing piano has been dutifully rendered, the woman depicted is a hybrid creature with the head of a bird. A chair located in the same room as the bird-headed woman mysteriously sprouts twisted floral vines that snake up the back wall. Gigantic insects infiltrate the room and swarm across the ornate damask wallpaper like a strange, inexplicable virus. These hybrid monsters, giant insects and fantastic vegetal growths disturb the inherent sentimentality of nostalgia and propose a dark, secret world that churns just beneath the veneer of domestic perfection.
Most of the elements within my dollhouse are hand-drawn and printed lithographs (stone lithography) which have been cut out, folded and glued. The dollhouse wallpaper was created digitally and printed on matte inkjet paper. A scaled-up stencil of the wallpaper was painted directly on the gallery walls.
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