The very first dolls I am aware of used to look at me from a wooden showcase at my paternal grandmother’s house. Handmade by my great-aunt Paulina, they were a true sampler of techniques and materials. Today they are part of my ongrowing collection -in the process of being catalogued-, and they clearly anchored my curious gaze on them and their up-to-scale universes. Since 2013, I have started to create them as a way to (re) invent myself. I also invite patients -in individual and group processes- to benefit from their medicine. Working with them is an inevitable destiny of my exploration with textiles. Dolls, like those of my childhood, are always good mirrors and kind interlocutors. There is little that we cannot see on ourselves thanks to their guide.
Along with them, I have been exploring their houses and their miniature settings, ideal scenarios to make our narratives conscious and also to map our futures. I work with dolls and their houses as an expressive and transforming tool, an amplifier of what is going through on us and what needs to be addressed. Until March 2020, I did it only on face-to-face meetings. From that moment forward, I created the group “Dolls on difficult times”, inaugurating my online group art therapy practice. This was my personal contribution to the collective processing of the effects of the pandemic on our lives and souls. It was -and still is- a non profit group. Currently, I am coordinating the group “Travelling Dolls”, an art therapy round robin of dolls, in which 12 women from Argentina and Uruguay create a doll to activate a personal power and then receive the other eleven to reflect on the powers they bring and make their textile marks on them.
