REGENERATRIX DOLLS

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Life Giver, Death Wielder, Regeneratrix was an installation created in 2016 for Tarpaulin Sky Book's launch of my novel, The Grotesque Child. The dolls in the installation, which were made out of my daughter’s repurposed cloth diapers, represent a merging of characters from my novel with characters in Vasilisa the Wise, a Russian fairy tale featuring Baba Yaga, a vestigial destroyer-regeneratrix goddess figure from Old Europe. The dolls not only represent the physical forms of birth, death, and rebirth, but also my re-envisioning of these forms through concepts explored in The Grotesque Child.

       

This installation was intuitively shaped by my ongoing interest in Baba Yaga and the ancient goddess roots of the witch, Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ interpretation of Vasilisa the Wise in Women Who Run With the Wolves, and the research of Marija Gimbutas in The Language of the Goddess.