For thousands of years, human beings have made figures in their own likeness. We have buried them with our dead, offered them to gods, given them to children, dressed them, desired them, damaged them, collected them and feared them. We invest them with identities, histories and emotions they do not possess, then find ourselves fascinated by the possibility that something of us might remain within them.

The doll occupies a strange territory between object and body. It can be toy, effigy, surrogate, ideal, fetish, commodity, companion or double. It can rehearse the roles a culture expects us to inhabit or allow us to dismantle them. We make dolls to resemble ourselves, but in doing so reveal our ideas about childhood, gender, beauty, power, mortality, memory and what it means to be human.

And the boundaries of the doll are shifting. Porcelain and cloth become plastic; the puppet becomes automaton; the mannequin becomes artificial body; the imagined double becomes avatar. The old human desire to animate what we have made has not disappeared. We have simply found new materials in which to attempt it.