ARTIST

Salt Lake City artist Kim Brown’s dolls harkens back to the traditions of Italy’s commedia dell’arte and the even older pageantry of the middle Ages. This suits the artist’s sensibilities, as she thinks of her dolls as playing roles in a Federic Fellini film. “My dolls speak to you from the heart,” she says with a smile, “but people aren’t really sure how they got there.”

One of the hardest achievements in creating a doll is instilling the feeling of motion in a figure that is immobile; transforming a figure from an inert being into a dynamic sculpture. Brown has been interested in “the manipulation of the human figure by unseen forces” since she stated making dolls more than 14 years ago. Her fascination with theater and puppetry has led her to create a wide variety of dolls, from Alexander Calder-like mobiles to marionettes drawn from the styles of European puppetry.

Like many women, Brown stated to make dolls when her children were infants. “I needed a creative outlet - something that was interesting to me - that I could pursue at home, while my daughter (now 13 years old) was sleeping,” she recalls. As a child, Brown had never been interested in making dolls, although she was always involved in artistic projects. “My mother was an interior designer who became a textile artist,” Brown notes. “She is a contemporary quilter who creates her own fabrics--I guess the apple has not fallen far from the tree. I grew up with a lot of creative energy around me. I was always encouraged to create,” explains the artist.

When she started experimenting with dolls, she made a few in cloths and then turned to Sculpey. “I liked a homely type of doll with a well-loved look. I recycled textiles, washing them and discharging them of the color until they appeared rumpled.” For a number of years, Brown made dolls primarily for family and friends, occasionally entering a local Utah doll show. In 1989, after seeing her work in an exhibit, the Utah Designer Craft Gallery commissioned Brown to make some pieces. She created a group in a mobile format, with dolls spinning around and jumping through wings. then the Coda Gallery of Palm Desert, California, saw her work and added Brown to their roster of artists. In 1992, when she showed her dolls to Brent Erckland of O.C. Tanner, a prestigious jewelry store in Salt Lake City, he invited her to design some pieces for the store’s Christmas windows that year.

While Brown was always delighted to be involved in local projects, she found the most exciting event of the early 1990s to be her participation in the 1992 National Institute of American Doll Artists (NIADA) conference in San Francisco. For the visiting artist’s critique, in which non-NIADA artists submit their work for evaluation by NIADA members, she brought a large marionette of copper-colored clay in a copper costume and elaborate headdress. The pieces impressed the judging artists, and later appeared in a doll collectors’ magazine. Brown received written accolades and encouragement from well-known NIADA artists such as Patricia Ryan Brooks, Floyed Bell, Elisabeth Flueler-Tomamichel and a cherished informal assessment from the late Bob McKinley. Brooks, a former standards chairman of NIADA, remembers being impressed with the he motion Brown’s work generated. “I get excited when I look at something and see it move--even when it’s not moving at all,” she notes. “Brown had it all--an artistic vision with technical polish.”

Nancie Mann, who shows Brown’s work at the Mann Gallery in Boston, remembers being impressed with the artist’s dolls at the San Francisco NIADA conference. “I said to myself, this is more art than doll. I saw a beautiful sense for mixing colors and patterns in fabrics,” she says. &ldq