“They’re just kind of hideous,” artist Jill Colinan says when asked to describe the pieces in her latest show. It’s an unusual description for someone discussing her own work, but it’s also pretty accurate. Colinan makes fabric dolls with crooked smiles, garish makeup, and lumpy bodies that oddly render them more human than anything you’ll find in a toy store.

“People think they’re funny,” she says. “Well, at first people say ‘Oh, they’re so scary.’ But people mix up ugly and scary, and think they’re the same thing.”

Colinan’s work was recently on display in Ruins, a two-person exhibition with fellow Providence artist Jen Corace. Colinan took the show title literally, placing dolls in rooms with fabric walls and rusty metal jewelry findings. “I was looking at Roman ruins and idols, and I thought it would be interesting to show the buried lost part of a wall, but a wall from the early twentieth century,” she says.

Colinan has been producing dolls for over 20 years. “Some of the older dolls were eaten by mice at my old studio,” she says. “I opened a drawer and their bodies were totally flat and ripped apart.” At the time she stuffed them with rice. Now she’s moved on to tiny beads, the kind used to stuff Beanie Babies. “I cut the heads off and make new bodies,” she says matter-of-factly. She’s been revisiting the older pieces lately.

Mounted to the gallery walls, the dolls were roughly the same height as Barbie dolls—“I’ll defend Barbies until the end of time,” she declares—but otherwise couldn’t be more different. Bandaged hands and graying hair suggest that these dolls have more interesting back stories than Barbie’s plastic perfection.

Colinan says that each begins with something physical, a particular fabric or a combination of colors, possibly something she found on a shopping mission. She visits estate sales and immediately scouts out the basement workshops and the sewing boxes for rusty metal and notions. Once she lucked out and happened upon an estate sale from a doll maker.

“It was everything I love under one dark, dusty roof,” she says. “I felt a real Grey Gardens kinship with him. I got his pin cushion and made a doll. I left the pins exactly how he left them. I used fabric from his collection. I cut off the head from another doll and Frankensteined it on.”

“Do you know ‘Underground,’ the Tom Waits song? ‘They’re alive, they’re awake / While the rest of the world is asleep.’ That’s how I think of them existing—after hours, after the normal people have gone.”

Jill Colinan–artist
Providence, Rhode Island
Website
Instagram

Top image: Detail of a Jill Colinan doll. Photo by Scott Lapham.

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In the fall of 2014, Corace and her brother, Jason, released Lords & Ladies: The Game of Not So Polite Society. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, the card game (designed by Jason and illustrated by Jen) revolves around aristocrats who build their status through marrying the right people, spreading gossip, and hiring servants that hopefully don’t turn out to be drunks. Players can choose among 32 marriageable suitors to extend their families and 11 servants to maintain the family estate.

The brother and sister are now at work on “Top Dog,” a card game set in the competitive world of dog shows. In crafting the game’s visual style, Corace is studying encyclopedias of dogs to master the 36 breeds the game will feature.

Card from Lords & Ladies game

She is also now teaching her first college course, a class at the University of Connecticut about going pro as an illustrator. “It’s a class in how to be an adult,” she says, with students learning how to market themselves and present their style to potential clients. Designed for illustration majors in their senior year, the class is a rare opportunity that isn’t offered at most art schools.

Corace has worked on quite a few children’s books, including Jill Esbaum’s I Hatched! and Mac Barnett’s Telephone, and she clearly has her own style nailed down. Selecting favorites is hard, but she’s partial to Randall de Sève’s Mathilda and the Orange Balloon, which received praise from Daniel Handler in The New York Times. “I like the message that you are who you believe you are,” she says.

Telephone | written by Mac Barnett illustrated by Jen Corace

She also likes Rose A. Lewis’s Sweet Dreams. “I really like how the artwork turned out on that one,” she says modestly. Since each book takes nearly a year to complete, Corace is careful which books and authors she works with. And she prefers indie publishers. “I like personal stories the most,” she says, “and smaller companies that are less dependent on market-driven decision making.”

Top image from Jen Corace’s Without, solo show 2014, at Land Gallery in Portland, OR

This piece first appeared our October 2014 print issue available here

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