I've always been interested in the reasons people have for procreating. At 27, I am undecided as to whether or not children will be in my future, which does not particularly stress me out one way or the other. As a child, I collected Cabbage Patch dolls, and had, like, 50 (no exaggeration). I had a Barbie kitchenette, a kid-sized hutch and doll-sized cradles and strollers taking over my room. I thought that getting married and having children was the only way that becoming an adult would happen, and that unmarried women had some kind of social disorder. Once I started going to college, I started questioning all of the bizarre mommy-training that had been going on throughout my childhood (and almost every other woman's childhood), and have since been quite interested in my biological urges and the extent to which they can be attributed to conditioning. In this situation nurture obviously outweighs nature, but to what extent? When I think of myself as a mother in the future, is it because that is really what I want, or is it only the remnants of this strange doll tradition? W
hen I believe that is not a part of my future, is
that really what I want, or is it a backlash against the doll tradition? Who thought of giving little girls facsimiles of babies to play with in the first place?! I think almost every woman has to deal with the assessment of where these urges and counter-urges come from, whether or not it matters, and which ones win out in the end.
At the end of graduate school I started exploring this idea a little more intimately, and created a series of stuffed rabbits with masks of babies faces on them. They came out extra creepy and funny, and I called them the surrogates. I liked the idea that one object can stand in for another, or be a place-keeper for a period of time. The idea was training for motherhood, and the weirdness of that venture; stuffed animals get traded in for dolls, which are then traded in for pets, and eventually babies. We learn over time to make living things dependent on us, and we start to love the feeling of being needed. The second series I was sketching out was a similar idea that involved the idea of blending genes, or keeping a man. I was going to do a series of collages of images of mothers and babies, with and without fathers, where the babies were wearing masks of the father's faces. It was supposed to illustrate the idea of taking some of a man and transferring it onto a dependent new human being. It's a little sick, but sometimes I think it's part of the motivation to procreate.
Well, I never did carry out that collage series, but Emily did show me this amazing website that did what I wanted to do only better. I know they are probably just trying to be creepy and funny, but I think there's something poignant about it. Enjoy
Manbabies.
Finally!! The renovations and updates are complete at my website!!! Now you can visit www.gretchendiehl.com for my news updates, my most up-to-date images of my artwork, links to sites of other fantastic artists, and also view my latest revision of my artist's statement and CV/Resume!! I am excited, can you tell?! Anyway, take a moment to review all of the updated awesome and let me know what you think!!
