Oil on Board, 40x40cm, 2025 - £495

What do dolls dream of?

Among clouds and yellow 'sky', a porcelain doll lies suspended, her gaze fixed upward—or inward—into a dream world. Above her, a constellation of symbolic forms: an upside-down golden finch, a dark crow, blooms and an ornate door knob. As an ex-psychotherapist, the artist’s enduring fascination with childhood is not nostalgic but investigative. The painting’s composition operates less as a narrative than as a pattern of symbols and aesthetic elements on the picture plane, in equilibrium, bound together not by logic but by  associations. 

The clouds tell us we're dreaming. The door knob suggests passageways...to the flowers beyond, the way to happiness?

The doll, that fragile vessel of projection, embodies innocence, dependency and the first rehearsals of identity. Here she is reimagined as a dreaming subject, adrift in a symbolic theatre where hopes of life and ideas of death, coexist. The birds in dialogue—the golden bird of light and song inverted, the crow as harbinger or guide—each poised around a bulb suggestive of pregnancy.

Like a surrealist tableau, Doll Dreams suspends meaning rather than resolving it, offering instead a visual meditation on thresholds: between childhood and adulthood, life and death, conscious and subconscious, body and spirit.

In this dreamspace, the viewer is invited not to decode but to drift—to inhabit, for a moment, the liminal realm where symbols are fluid and the self is pregnant with potential.