Lou's Dollirium
Updated: Feb 20
Well FairyFindrs,
Today I’m extremely grateful to introduce you beautiful beings to a wonderful and talented theater-designer-turned-doll-artist, Lou Gray!
When I stumbled upon her Instagram page @lousdollirium as a fellow queer and trans OOAK doll artist, I was absolutely thrilled that there was someone else out there making transgender and drag dolls. Especially trans masculine dolls, even if most of hers are technically drag queens and drag kings, not trans men.
(Lou and her drag dolls! Day 5 of “Guys and Dolls” exhibition at the Yard Gallery, Stroud, England)
Alex the FairyFindr: Hello Lou, welcome to the FairyFindr Fam! We are absolutely delighted to have you here with us! Please introduce yourself with your name and pronouns and tell us a bit about your art path throughout your life?
Lou: “ Hi Alex, I’m Lou of Lou’s Dollirium - she/her - and I customize/transform dolls - mostly Barbies, Kens and Actionmen.
Up until lockdown I was a theatre designer, but theatres all went dark in the UK during the Pandemic and so I started painting dolls then to keep myself occupied.
I trained in theatre design and approach doll transformation in the same way. As if they’re performers!
I’ve also done other things -( I’m quite old! 63!) Eg. themed party decor, puppetry, When my kids were young, I ran workshops in schools.
Alex the FairyFindr: What kind of workshops!?
Lou: Ooh - model-making, murals, felt-making, giant puppets, costume, mask-making… Theatre design covers quite a lot of skills!
Alex the FairyFindr: Fantastic array of work! I’m also a multimedia artist! I find that that doll making and toy photography community and hobby is an intriguing and fulfilling way to hit a lot of these different artistic avenues.
Lou: Agreed! I often joke about the dolls, that they’re easier to work with than actors! They don’t complain!
(Tons of close ups of various Drag Kings and Queens made by Lou)
Alex the FairyFindr: 🤣🤣🤣 I can totally see that, I like that about dolls to they are never mean to me!
I know you initially did theater design, what inspired you to start making your drag dolls?
Lou: Years ago I was working on a devised theatre show that was exploring issues like violence against women, pornography etc. As part of my design- research, I visited a ToysRus shop and was pretty horrified by the gender divide in the toy aisles. Actionmen seemed some of the worst at that time. Since then I’ve been interested in subverting those stereotypes. It amuses me to remove their weapons and aggressive macho expressions and paint drag makeup, give them wigs and dresses etc. That’s the main reason. But it’s got me into real Drag now!
Alex the FairyFindr: Did your love of drag come from working in theater or from anyone specific who inspired you?
Lou: I guess it’s the OTT theatricality of drag and the wild costumes and the humour.
In England, we have traditional pantomimes with the hero of the story played by a woman - ‘Principle Boy’ and an older woman character played comically by a man…. The Pantomime Dame. Usually very rude!
Alex the FairyFindr: That sounds amazing . I love the circus too, but hate the history of animal violence associated with it. However, I’ve always been extremely fascinated by human oddities, such as freak shows, they are right down my alley!
I love that! I’m always intrigued by mimes! We have a famous one here in Detroit named Satori Circus, he’s wonderful! 🤡
Lou: I’ll look him up 👍🏻 I also really love the Circus!
Alex the FairyFindr: You’ll love him then for sure! There was recently a documentary made about him! I’ll link it in the blog here!
Lou: Ok! Yes freak-shows! I’ve done a “tattooed lady” and several “tiger, jaguar, zebra and lizard people” They’re fun to paint!
(You can see them on Lou's instagram here)
Just going back to drag performers who’ve inspired me: @lepustra is an absolutely gorgeous performer based in Berlin and I’ve done about 12 dolls of different characters of his…
He seems to be ok with he.
Here are his links:
These are some of my Lepustra dolls: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CgSLRN9D-Ee/?igsh=MTRzNWp5Nmc5bTZteg==
Alex the FairyFindr: Ok Cool!
I’m a fellow doll creator and artist, and yours are definitely some of the best and most interesting dolls I’ve seen in the OOAK doll community! How do you think your love of theater and design shines through in your doll and miniature work?
Lou: “ Aww thanks!
As a theatre designer, I would do drawings of costume designs for actors. Those drawings would about the same size as the dolls. So in a way, the dolls are just like 3D costume designs
Many costume and fashion designers don’t draw faces on their drawings, but I always did. I love faces and trying to get a likeness.
Here are a few old costume drawings for various theatre productions https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrYvcQRr0rQ/?igsh=ZXQxM2owcTVkeTg0
I think my theatre background makes my work quite bold in style, in the way that theatre makeup is much bolder than film make-up.
I love painting with a brush and acrylics and can’t be bothered with all that dusting with pastels and re-rooting hair etc like many doll artists.
Alex the FairyFindr: Agreed it’s a lot of work, especially for folks as myself who suffer with chronic pain and carpal tunnel. Rerooting hair is just not possible for me .
Lou: I’m sorry you suffer with those things, Alex
I really dislike the synthetic hair as well. I quite often paint into it, or just shave it off and glue colored wool over it, or have actually rerooted a couple of times but with wool.
Doll costumes are quicker and easier to make than human ones but follow the same principles, So having costume construction skills is helpful. Although I do often customize existing doll-clothes as well!
I also like to think about putting the dolls into a setting or making installations, particularly window displays, with them…so I guess there I’m utilizing my experience in set design, lighting, model and prop making etc.
Everything with the dolls is the same only smaller!
Alex the FairyFindr: Yeah I also have scoliosis so a lot of art forms I can only do for a short period of time or in spurts when I’m feeling good.
Lou: “oh, bless you, that’s tough xxx
(Some of Lou's Transmasculine /drag king dolls)
Alex the FairyFindr: I’d love to see some of your dioramas. What types of materials do you use to make them?
Lou: Boxes for levels, fabrics, vases, fake flowers, beads, fairy lights, background eg. vintage wallpaper, lights… depends… anything really!
Getting the dolls to stand up is always a challenge! I’ve done quite a few window displays.
These 6 were my most recent:
(These were for a window installation at Boomtown festival in England)
Alex the FairyFindr: I love your circus 🎪 themed work so much it’s what got me to follow you in the first place! What inspires you most in the doll making process?
Lou: Things I’ve been inspired by, so far: circus, drag, Mexican day of the dead, Frida Khalo, mermaids, animals, Weimar Republic, protest.. who knows what next?
With the process: the finishing touches are the most fun part!
I like getting commissions to make portrait dolls of specific people. Can be quite challenging sometimes. But it’s nice to get involved with the person who’s commissioned the doll and communicate through the process about different details and stages.
I also enjoy doing research and finding images to inspire or guide me. So much easier now with search engines. When I was young it was just taking photocopies from books in libraries!!
Alex the FairyFindr: That was one of my questions… If you take commissions! What’s the best way for folks to contact you and hire you to do a commission doll?
Lou: It mostly happens through DMs on here, Instagram. I also have FB but prefer Instagram. I’ve never quite managed to get a website together!
Alex the FairyFindr: Me either, 🤣 it’s so exhausting honestly, trying to make a website! It took me years just to get a blog website up!
Walk us through the process of making one of your dolls from first conception of an idea, to picking the doll, finding or making the clothes, and the end product with the box and everything else that doll has included.
Lou: Ok.
Recently, I decided that I needed a Josephine Baker doll in the 1920s themes window. She was a famous black dancer and singer from back then
I have a few black dolls in my collection of preloved (only use 2nd hand dolls - am anti-plastic, really!)
Anyway JB had a very tight close hairstyle and I didn’t want to cut any of my black dolls hair, so I chose a bald white doll and painted her brown all over with the black hair.
She’s a particularly good doll with articulated joints that I’d been saving for something special. She does have beautiful inset blue eyes, which probably aren’t right for Josephine Baker, but look very pretty with her brown skin
I had to do her quickly for the Boomtown display so only painted her skimpy costume on and added sparkly Christmas decoration leaf-wings.
I intend soon to make her a skirt out of tiny bananas, which is a costume she was famous for.
Alex the FairyFindr: Upcycling and reusing trash or old and broken dolls and toys is a huge part of my passion and ethics as an artist as well. Everything I do has a bit of trash or reused something or other.
Lou: Same here. Absolutely re-use!
Many of the Drag Queens are squeezed into Barbie dresses!
And I made presentation boxes for them out of green-bean boxes from my local greengrocer.
But yes I’m passionate about recycling as much as possible in this Age of Plastic!
Alex the FairyFindr: Absolutely. I pick up boxes of toys from folks on Facebook marketplace or sometimes even come across boxes full of toys and plushies in the trash, it’s crazy what people throw into landfills.
Lou: Yeah, I occasionally go to car-boot sales, (there are great ones in Normandy, France)
but actually most of the dolls I get are donations from people clearing out their grownup kids old toys. My own daughter gave me all hers too. She’s 19 now.
Alex the FairyFindr: Do you ever write storylines for your dolls and put them in peculiar predicaments? If so, describe to the audience what your fave one was?
Lou:Yes. I can’t help myself 😂
They all have names and characters so the story potential is endless!
When I started with the dolls, I also started my first and only instagram account and posted a serial story in daily installments about a circus and a bunch of DragQueens.
The story became a bit too complicated after a while and I abandoned it. But it’s still there: https://www.instagram.com/p/CO-2pqYjUPn/?igsh=MTgzaHpuOGcxZTV1cA== this is just before I abandoned the story. It had just got too silly!
This caption tells the story in my head that was behind a window display that I did for Bristol Pride last year “The Blue Fairy”
And this a film showing that window https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuCUP6duaDa/?igsh=MXAwd2tzNXRjeXV2Ng==
Alex the FairyFindr: Do you feel sad when you sell a doll and have to part ways with them? Personally I feel like I’m grieving the loss of a child even though I want my dolls to get adopted it still feels like a part of me is being lost when they go to a new home and it took me several years of making the dolls to even consider selling them!
Lou: Oh yes, particularly when I started! Now I have accumulated so many it’s not quite so hard. The most recent one I’ve done is always my favourite.
Now I’m better at photographing them, it makes it a bit easier to part with them - if I have good photos. But sometimes, with commissions, there isn’t much time to photograph them.
Alex the FairyFindr: Please tell us about this most recent art gallery exhibit that you had with your drag dolls! The pics look amazing and I’d love to hear about the experience!
Lou: I’ve only been doing these dolls since lockdown, 4 years ago, so that’s not long. This was my very first exhibition - theatre designers don’t have exhibitions, they work towards putting on productions. So it was all quite daunting. But it was a joint exhibition with a collage-artist friend. He’d had several exhibitions before, found this new gallery, booked it and asked if I’d like to join him a few months ago. I jumped at the chance.
It was just a flat fee to hire the space. Very reasonable No commission to pay and a couple of months to get my work ‘exhibition-ready’!
My friend produced a set of new collages about the Apollo 11 moon landing as well as older work. I produced a set of new Drag Dolls with rude drag-names on their presentation boxes, as well as my older work - quit a lot of which I presented in deep frames or shadow-boxes. I wanted to hang the dolls on the wall.
I sold some of the older work and some photos that I’d had printed, but was disappointed that not one of the Drag queens sold at the exhibition. I think, in hindsight, that the small market-town of Stroud was probably the wrong audience for these dolls.
My next exhibition will be in the pretty funky city of Bristol, where I actually live!
But I’m confident that the Drag queens will sell online nearer to Christmas.
Other years people have bought them to put on top of their Christmas trees!
It was very exciting to see my work presented like this and people seemed to enjoy the exhibition. My co-exhibitor and I were both there every day to chat with people.
It was fun to see people’s reactions to our work. A lot of people were laughing. Particularly when they read my doll-names out loud! https://www.instagram.com/reel/C91immMsfjp/?igsh=OTlrbWljZms1OTkx
Alex the FairyFindr: How do you come up with the names for each doll and whereabouts in the process does the name usually come about?
Lou: Haha! The most recent lewd drag doll names (eg Arlene Ova - below) were brainstormed with friends and I with wine around a bonfire, while camping. Much hilarity!
I then chose the dolls that seemed to fit the names! But other doll names just come to me while I’m creating them.
Alex the FairyFindr: Do you ever take commissions from folks if they wanted to have you make a very own drag doll of their own?
Lou: Yes, I have a few drag friends that I’ve done dolls of. Here’s (below) one of my lovely friend, PG, dressed as a character he created called ‘The Blue Fairy’:
I did it for him to say thank you for collaborating with me and the use of his gallery-window for a big display for last years Bristol Pride: “The Blue Fairy’s Closet’.
Here is a nice story about a mum who commissioned me to make a drag mermaid doll of her son, who had rejected boys toys and had an Ariel-mermaid that they’d loved as a child
Aida HD - storytelling-DragQueen:
This was a doll that I made of a Drag queen that I follow, tagged them and, as a consequence, they bought it!
I made this one, Baga Chipz,
A famous UK Drag Queen from DragRace, as a thank you gift to a woman for donating a whole box of Actionmen to me through the post.
I tagged Baga Chipz on a post about it and they shared this picture on their Instagram stories which was a big buzz!
I have had commissions from other people wanting dolls of themselves.
This one comes to mind - a commission from a french actor inspired him to make this funny video in response https://www.instagram.com/p/CeWxJ7SsS71/?igsh=OTU3MGFyMnVjcWwy ♥️
I’ve also done a doll of myself which I use as my profile pic (below).
(Lou's Mini Me Doll)
But usually commissions are for other people. I have one coming up for an English singer famous in the 80s, called Adam Ant. (He’s still alive, I think)
Last year, I did the late Freddie Mercury of Queen..
Alex the FairyFindr: Wow! Amazing job on Freddie Mercury- he would absolutely love this doll! Where can folks find you online and how should they contact you to buy or commission work?
Lou: At the moment it’s mostly Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lousdollirium
And Facebook (I’m not so keen on FB tho)
I’m in the process of making my accounts easier to shop from.
It’s all quite difficult and new for me, this selling thing, but I’ve learned a lot from conversations with potential customers at my recent exhibition.
Well FairyFindrs, let's give Lou a big welcome and THANK YOU for joining the FairyFindr Fam today and sharing her art and story with us! Stay tuned for more interesting interviews with talented artists, stories and more!
If you want to support me and. the work, art, and businesses I support here on my self-hosted website you can check out my shop or Subscribe to one of my monthly Patreon tiers where you'll see early access of all my blogs, art, merch drops, and Patreon exclusive content!! Subscribe on Patreon under ADHDalex : https://www.patreon.com/ADHDalex
✨✨🧚♂️🧚♂️🍀🍀 ✨✨🧚♂️🧚♂️🍀🍀 ✨✨🧚♂️🧚♂️🍀🍀 ✨✨🧚♂️🧚♂️🍀🍀 ✨✨🧚♂️🧚♂️🍀🍀
Please leave a comment or message below and let us know how YOU got started in your magical or fairy related artwork or creative avenues! We can’t wait to hear your stories!! If you want to be a part of the blog and do your own magical interview of your dreams. Please feel free to find all our links on our LinkTree or connect on our FairyFindr Website, OR email me at FairyFindr@gmail.com
May the fae bless you,
Comments