Some things are just hard to write about. Last week, a friend clued me in to the work of Jennifer Stocks-Dearborn, a Vermont artist who is definitely blazing her own trail. Her work is "Extreme Craft" in just about every sense of the word....and I was dumbfounded about how to write about it. You see--Jennifer Stocks-Dearborn makes polymer sculptures of.... gulp.... babies who have died. For a donation, she will make a memorial doll from your photo of your dead baby. She lost her own baby to SIDS several years back, and improbably, the sculpting process helps to heal that old wound.
Lucky for me, Stocks-Dearborn has a sense of humor about the whole thing. She KNOWS that it's a little weird for a grown woman to go around sculpting dead babies. She describes her sculptures in interviews as "creepy naked babies". As much as I'd love to roll my eyes and make some easy snarky joke, I found it more rewarding to dig a bit deeper. The artist was inspired to start making her work when she saw that old email chestnut claiming that Canadian sculptor Camille Allen's sculptures of premature babies were made out of marzipan (remember that one?). Stocks-Dearborn soon found herself making "creepy naked babies" of the dead variety, and a chance encounter with eBay changed everything for her. She now wrestles with art and commerce like a bona-fide artist:
And instead of keeping these naked babies in a box in my attic for my grandchildren to discover after my death -- I instead offer my services to other families who might want them. I don't push, I don't promote--- I just let things happen on their own. Think of it like this: They have a path....sculpting lets me loose myself in my work for awhile. I'm able to think about Maddie and really focus my energy on her...and then I'm done. A stopping point. BUT instead of packing it away it moves on....to another family who needs it. Someone who needs to have something else that represents their passed baby --- a knick-knack of sorts. Small enough to be tucked away in a drawer and kept private until an emotional collapse....My work is just as selfish as it is giving.
You can check out an article that's a little bit snarky about Stocks-Dearborn at Vermont's Seven Days Webweekly. The good folks at Seven Days also put together this little slideshow to give you a better idea of the artwork. Listening to the audio in the slideshow, you can tell how heartfelt the work is. It's her dogged determination to move forward with her art in the face of societal taboos that makes her "extreme"....that and her insistence on calling the prices for her sculptures "adoption (sic) fee's"
