The Love Doll: Days 1-36

The Love Doll: Days 1-36 follows Laurie Simmons as she photographs a life-size Japanese love doll through the invented rhythm of an ordinary life, extending a body of work that has staged artificial figures as stand-ins for women since the late 1970s.

Simmons acquired the doll and photographed it over an extended period, dressing and posing it in domestic interiors — bathing, dressing, reading, waiting — so that a single character accumulates a fictional biography across the sequence of images. The pictures return to concerns present throughout Simmons' career: the uncanny space between the animate and the inanimate, and the way domestic femininity is staged, performed and manufactured. The book, edited by Lynne Tillman, was published as the catalogue for a run of gallery exhibitions in New York, London and Tokyo between 2011 and 2013.

The project extends Simmons' work from her 1970s ventriloquist-dummy and dollhouse photographs through her earlier series with Japanese love dolls, and anticipates her continued exploration of surrogate figures standing in for the female body.