EnChantED doLL

Artist Bio

Making dolls has been the most constant aspect of her life since she was six years old. Bio believe that she was born to do this.

Bio was born in the South-Western Siberia, Russia in 1982 and fourteen years later immigrated to Vancouver, Canada along with her immediate family: Mom, dad and two younger sisters. Here, she graduated from High School in 2001 and then from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2006 with a Bachelor of Fine Art.

The artist fiercely resented the institution for the first couple of years into her degree and to this day still harbor residual disappointment and bitterness towards the program, which she feel didn’t teach her enough. Despite its shortcomings however, she is able to appreciate its contemporary approach to art education, as it was crucially instrumental in the development of critical thought and conceptual aspects of her creative process. Because she felt that ECIAD wasn’t teaching much of anything other than abstract theories and thought development without any applicable and concrete, professional skills, she decided to take some independent jewelry courses on the side to apply that knowledge to her doll art practice. It turns out she love learning, because ever since then she try to take at least one jewelry course a year to learn something new and broaden her horizons. Bio believe that the secret to beautiful and engaging artwork is looking outside of a particular medium for inspiration and bringing other aspects into it. The reason that there are so many ugly and boring dolls out there is because people who make them look to other dolls for inspiration and continue to regurgitate what they see, thus making the same doll over and over and over again.

Creating a visual narrative is the most intriguing way of articulating my ideas and a doll is a perfect medium because of its potential for such visual story. Bio's strong tendency for escapism has made the make belief narrative of fairy tales very appealing as a context for my dolls. What interests she most about fairy tales is the implicit and often explicit violence that lies just beneath the surface of the magic.