1950
Indwe, South Africa
Designer and Digital artist

Paper Dolls Lunll Kruger

I am a woman, a mother, a daughter, a lover, a white South African raised in an Afrikaner, Calvinist tradition.

My art is my observation of what women are, the submissive and the survivors and the struggle to move from one to the other and to become the self.

I use digital media to manipulate mannequins and dolls, representative of a sort of Stepford Wife of God or the Creator and of other powers - a patriarchal system, male dominance, physical strength, the power of religion, social structures and historical behaviours - to create the result of feelings and thoughts in a sensual, sexual, maternal thinking woman-being.

The dolls are representative of a self-image established in childhood of required beauty and unthinking, blinking availability to be dressed, cuddled, forgotten, displayed. A perfect bought or given object without self-determination.

The indifferent, mindless sexuality of the mannequins on display in the windows of the consumer world, merely there to display other goods, usually an understated, conformed to a static nothingness, backdrop to the needs of others, whilst still attentive of the need for beauty and sexiness to be useful, reflect a cold and unsettling reality of the souls of some females as a result of subjugation or of what can become of one submitting or subjected to these powers.

I combine the large infantile, yet adult, doll-heads with their staring, obliging eyes and shiny plastic hair, their perfect mouths and rounded pink cheeks and the static, exposed, sexual mannequins and manipulate them digitally to create female rebellion, intelligence, pains, loves, my own resistance as a woman, my embedded angst and also throughout, the underlying dualism of religion: simultaneously powerfully destructive and reassuring of the self, as enforced upon or employed by ones mind.

No amount of making art can replace the immensity of my life experience, the physical (not sexual unless brute force is also sexual) and psychological mangling of my Lunll-ness and woman-ness by the powers around me and by the powerlessness of my own weaknesses, mentally and physically, as created and imposed. I also understand that my gradual inner strengthening comes from exactly those abuses. My choice would be to be strengthenedis there a different way? When I am strong, I become curious, gentle, giving and sensual again - I become fully the Lunll-woman again acting from my own will and being. I believe my ideas and reflections encapsulate the psyche of all women to a larger or lesser degree