Art-Lit Salon: Dolls

Only RSL Members can book this event. Public tickets can be purchased via the The London Library here.

NB Doors (and the bar and chat) open at 6.45pm, the talk will run from 7.15-8.15/8.30pm and the bar will close at 8.45pm. 

Join us for chat, discussion, drinks and thought-provocation as we partner with Art/Lit, The London Library’s salon event, which explores all things art, all things literature and where the two forms collide. 

We’re taking inspiration from Greta Gerwig and riding the Barbie wave by delving into the world of dolls, with poet and novelist Karen McCarthy Woolf and artist Liorah Tchiprout, both of whom use dolls to construct alternative realities in the worlds of their latest work. 

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s debut novel Top Doll imagines the world as seen and narrated by the vast collection of antique dolls left behind by the reclusive billionaire Huguette Clark when she died at the age of 104. The dolls tell tales which take us from their lavish Park Avenue home, back in time to the slave plantations of Virginia and the palaces of Imperial Japan via the addictive hedonism of 1930s queer LA. Told in a fusion of poetry and prose, it is a highly unreliable, semi-fictional miniature epic of love, betrayal, Barbies and ultimately, what it means to be human. 

Liorah Tchiprout’s recent debut solo exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, ’Two Eyes Wide Open at the Edge of Dawn’, consists of paintings, monotypes and etchings, all portraits of subjects who gaze confidently at the viewer or who turn away lost in thought, with expressions of sorrowful longing and self-assuredness, as modelled by a cast of dolls, which she makes in her studio. The titles of the works are taken from songs and poetry to reflect the inner lives of the ‘sitters’ and the interior experience of womanhood and the work is inspired by Yiddish women writers and artists including Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Charlotte Salomon and Celia Paul. 

In conversation, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Liorah Tchiprout discuss dolls, collections of dolls, and what dolls can tell us about our own realities, our histories and our humanity.