Artist Amber Hawk Swanson: Sex Doll in her Likeness

Recently, I came across the performance and video artist Amber Hawk Swanson, who created a sex doll in her likeness. She then took the doll to tailgate parties, sporting and other public events and created a photographic project pairing her with her doll to explore feminism, violence and gender identity. There is something eerie and compelling about her work.

See her video too.

As Amber says,

In 2007, I commissioned the production of a life-like sex doll, a RealDoll, made of a posable PVC skeleton and silicone flesh, in my exact likeness. My doll, Amber Doll, began as a Styrofoam print-out of a digital scan of my head. Her face was then custom-sculpted and later combined with the doll manufacturer’s existing, “Body #8” female doll mold. After completing, “The Making-Of Amber Doll” and “Las Vegas Wedding Ceremony” (both 2007), Amber Doll and I went on to disrupt wedding receptions, roller-skating rinks, football tailgating parties, theme parks, and adult industry conventions. In the resulting series, “To Have, To Hold, and To Violate: Amber and Doll,” ideas surrounding agency and objectification are questioned, as are ideas about the success or failure of negotiating power through one’s own participation in a cultural narrative that declares women as objects. My work with Amber Doll, herself a literal object, deals with such themes through an oftentimes-complicated feminist lens. Similar concerns emerge in my series, “The Feminism? Project” (2006). The script for each video in the series was generated from interviews with women across the state of Iowa on the subject of feminism.