Dolls Parts:John Lee Bird @ Ugly Duck.

"I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs" - Doll Parts, Hole

 

When the artist and musician John Lee Bird developed chronic spinal problems he found no longer able to paint. No longer able to create. This left him frustrated (quite understandably) but when he found some sheets of felt in his desk he struck on an idea and that idea, as you'll soon see, has spiralled almost uncontrollably.

He started making dolls. Of musicians he admired, of characters from horror films, and even his friends. At Bermondsey's Ugly Duck gallery there's a free exhibition of them so I braved yesterday's downpour and headed down there. Not quite sure what to expect.

You enter a warehouse, walk up some wooden stairs, and then you're confronted with, quite literally, shedloads of the things. I couldn't make out who they all were (I'd certainly not have been able to recognise Bird's friends) but I managed to identify quite a few. Some of my identifications are possibly even correct.

There's Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love (who head up this piece), there's Lemmy (like most of the dolls there's something of the Giacometti about the former Motorhead frontman), there's Marilyn Manson, there's Pennywise, there's the Grady twins from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, there's The Ramones, there's Robert Smith of The Cure, and then there's Sparks.

There's a guy who's naked apart from some golden boots and some golden pants with a golden dildo attached (any idea? I feel it's someone I ought to recognise), there's ZZ Top. there's Sigue Sigue Sputnik, there's Leatherface, there's Freddie Kruger, and then there's Bootsy Collins. It's not a line up you tend to see under the same roof at the same time.

Is that Five Star above? Or is it Steps? Either way that's a bit of a curveball. I think that's Jimi Hendrix below and I'm fairly certain that that's John Cooper Clarke and Freddie Mercury but one iconic figure of British music hasn't cropped up yet. David Bowie.

That's because there's another room, an antechamber if you will, which is full of Bowies. About seventy of them. There's the Thin White Duke, there's Aladdin Sane, there's the Let's Dance Bowie, and then there's the Low era Bowie which was the first doll that Bird ever made.

There's even some Warhol style screenprints of Bowie and, for some unknown reason, a grotesque figure who'd look more at home in The Wicker Man than in a room full of David Bowie dolls.There's not really much I can actually say about this show (which you can't already see) but I enjoyed it. Better still it seems to have brought Bird some satisfaction. 

In a recent, and very brief, interview in The Guardian the artist said "I only get a real sense of accomplishment if I can look at something I’ve physically made. Then I can haul myself upstairs to bed and feel I’ve achieved a tiny something with my day." That's pretty much how I felt when I headed back home, the rain still pouring down.