Every time I said something about 'Alice's doll' someone was there to correct me to say "Professor Shalvi".
There were few people in this world who only called her Alice, or mom.
Pnina is the little girl, the youngest daughter of her mother, who is the late Professor Alice Shalvi.
She remembers herself sitting for hours as a child and looking at the art books that were plentiful at home, Botticelli's Madonnas and Renaissance romance, together with the Israeli abstract of the 70s that covered the walls of her childhood home as sources of her inspiration for her own art to this day.
Her mother would take her to the theater And to concerts. Pnina would accompany her mother on fund-raising trips abroad and absorb art and culture that flowed from her mother anyway - and she was the one who wanted to absorb all this goodness, it was all interesting for her, her mother was interesting.
"This doll", Pnina explains to me when we meet in my studio to plan how to incorporate everything she brought for this project in the actual doll itself, "this doll is a pathway to my childhood, through my mother's things."
I'm excited, and I think she knows.
In every doll making there is a positioning or a return to a certain role that is within us among the many roles we have taken on in our journeys.
The role of being a mother's child, is one of those that I meet a lot , I usually keep it to myself, And here with Pnina, she literally said it. And it excites me to refer to it openly.
In her mind she returns to her little self, a homely girl who comes home from school and immediately changes into the fairy character in the nightgown, enters her mother's closet and adorn oneself with jewelry and scarves - Alice Shalvi (I struggle with Prof.) had a very special style and high-class clothes that she would order especially from a seamstress, but Pnina dosen't remember exactly what she use to wear , but what was in the closet, which served as a box of costumes and a gate to another world.
And Alice agreed.
The previous dolls I made for Pnina (and her sister!) from the clothes of her father, Moshe, were a character from a fairy tale he invented - rabbits named Bugz and Ernie.
And this doll - the fairy - had a ready-made name from another legend he created for her, about Fafa & fufu.
And so the fairy Fafa was born, a doll created from 16 different items, we tried to give each of them the respect they deserve and I hope we succeeded, welcome to our world, Fafa.
