Capitalising On An Obsession

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31071, 28 May 1966, Page 5

Capitalising On An Obsession

(By a staff correspondent of the “Sydney Morning Herald ’’) WHEN I walked up the quiet suburban street in Turnham Green, London, opened the gate of No. 20a I didn’t realise I was walking into a doll’s house that makes even the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party seem square. It’s the home of 24-year - old Jann Haworth, her popartist husband Peter Blake, and the rest of Jann’s large family.

Jann introduced me to grandfather first. “This is

Grandfather, but I call him Frank,” she said. Grandfather sat silently in the dining-room beside Grandmother who was having a nap. Her head was sunk on her wizened old chest. Neither of them moved—or did they? Was that a nod of greeting from Grandfather? His spectacles glinted but he didn’t utter a word. 7 Feet Tall In the bedroom I was introduced to Surfer Boy, all six feet of him, stripped to the waist to show off his rippling muscles and his bronzed torso. Then I met the Silver Lady, seven-feet tall and covered from head-to-toe in silver satin. Mae West, not a member of the family, wasn’t there

today. She was at an art gallery. We sat down and Jann offered me coffee. My eyes flickered over the pudding-basin-sized, willow-pattern cup and the pile of crocheted doughnuts on a plate.

Not For Gifts In the end I just sat and gazed at the bookcase, where the shelves are filled with old boots and 1930-fashion sandals and old toy ears, and listened to Jann explain why she is obbsessed with making dolls from cloth and kapok and old silk stockings. “I’m not sure why 1 make dolls,” she said smoothing back her long, dark hair. “I made Grandfather after I came to England from Los Angeles four years ago because I felt it would be nice to have a grandfather around. “I don’t have a ‘real’ oldfashioned Grandfather—mine is young and has recently married for the third time.

“I call my doll-Grandfather Frank, but that doesn’t mean that I have to give all my dolls names.

“I haven’t got a special name for Surfer Boy. I made Grandmother as atoken gesture to my real grandmother who was never really with us,” she said. Jann said she first became doll-crazy when she started making them for her little sister when she was nine. “The first ones were a bit primitive but I improved," she said.

“It’s not a consciously directed thing. It has become different now in thought but not in drive or direction,” she said. “It's still the same kind of thing but if you are making something as a present you are making it for a different reason.” Jann doesn’t make her dolls for presents now. “I’m 100 per cent selfish about them these days,” she said. And instead of giving them away as presents, Jann’s dolls are earning her living for her. London art critics call her a new pop-art genius and museums and collectors are snapping up her work.

Massive Bracelet She had an exhibition at the Robert Frazer Gallery in London recently and a Sao Paolo, Braizl, gallery bought one of her cloth charm bracelets for £375. The bracelet is 16 feet long. “I capitalise on my own obsession now,” said Jann. who studied philosophy and art at the University of California. “Although it’s done with great pleasure something has changed. I don’t quite know what.”

Jann doesn’t know what direction her work will take in the future.

“I’m still working out ideas I first had a year ago," she said. “Each doll takes four months to complete and 1 still have a backlog of ideas. There’s a time drag on what I want to do and what 1 have time to do.”

She regards the Silver Lady as the most fantastic of her dolls so far. “1 wanted her to resemble a knight in armour and a person in a space suit.” she said. She had been toying with the idea for some time. "I was influenced by the big satin jewels I was making at the time. 1 tried to make the figure with the same geometric facets as the jewels,” she said.

Outsize Rings On the floor at the feet of the Silver Lady is one of Jann’s outsize rings. The jewel is as large as a saucepan and the ring itself would fit over a child’s head. Jann’s father is an art director in Hollywood. “When I was small he would bring horn? giant-sized pencils and mock rocks from the movie sets for me to play with,” she said.

“Maybe this has affected me, I don’t know. Perhaps pop art has provided a home for my dolls. The substance of art has become more temporary. I don’t care if my dolls get dusty and fall to pieces in a hundred years from now. Perhaps if I had stayed in America I would have changed my mind and welded them in metal.” She cannot think of parting with her dolls. “They are a substitute family,” she said. “I would rather get a bigger house for them.”

Work Programme Jann isn’t sure what she’ll think of next. "Perhaps more fantasy. But I prefer to work within a tight limitation. 1 find more satisfaction if there is a limit in reality. The Silver Lady, who 1 call ‘fancy lovely,’ not ‘fancy pretty,’ is the most indefinite

thing I have made yet,” she said.

As she talked, Jann sewed a cloth Dick Tracy and Peanuts comic for Grandfather to read. She outlines the comic characters with black stitching and colours them in with crayon. She makes the comic “balloons" three-dim-ensional by padding them.

Child's World Why comics? “When 1 was younger 1 liked comics but 1 never read them. 1 just looked at the pictures. That’s why 1 never write anything in the balloons,” she said. Jann lived in a magic-world when she was a child.

“I always pretended I was a boy or a horse or Tarzan,”

“1 was disconcerned at she said.

Her parents were divorced when she was six and from that time on she says she didn’t regard herself as a child.

“If anyone wanted me to ride on the merry-go-round I thought I would look silly—fancy a great big, grown-up person on a merry-go-round! And I would never play with ordinary dolls like other children either,” she said. She has strong opinions about marriage as a result of her parents’ divorce. “It has caused me to be very against marriage,” she said. “It’s very frightening in America —something not to get involved with."

Used To Dolls But she changed her mind when she met the bearded English artist, Peter Blade. After she met him she went home and made him into a two-foot doll, with jeans and shirt and a white beard. She gave him the doll and they were married. Peter has accepted Jann’s family into his home completely now. “I was disconcerned at first,” he said. “I used to come into a room and see Grandfather or someone out of the corner of my eye and I would start a little. “But I’m used to them now.