Tia Lacie has transformed a dolls’ house into a representation of a body, as a way of working through her experience of having an abortion. In her interpretation, the door and windows resemble her body, with the inside rooms corresponding to different parts of it. She explains, “She was trying to best articulate what it felt like being her at this time. The bay windows acting as the breasts and the door acting as the vagina. With one of a dolls’ house’s main functions being to be opened, she thought it was a perfect thing to use to represent her body as it needed to be opened up too; this act is both vulnerable as well as violent as it opens and splits the door in half.”

For Lacie, a dolls’ house is an important image in her practice. She notes, “When she’s working on the dolls’ house, she is literally taking on the role of homemaker in a sense. When she works with found objects, she always thinks about the person who owned them before her and how they loved them, an invisible string tying her to them. It felt strange to be undoing all the work some family clearly did to do up this house for their child and how she’s using it to express the opposite of their views – she doesn’t want children.”