The Scary Dolls’ Sex Shop, 2023

“I thought of the title long before starting to make this piece.

It was going to be mainly retail; shelves full of furtively suggestive objects either with absurdly blatant packaging or parcels of various sizes and shapes discreetly wrapped in brown paper. I knew from the start that the shop’s roof would be in the form of a gigantic Scary Doll’s head, the kind of thing that would be refused planning permission in any but the most raunchy of districts. As a further provocation the roof/head now gyrates in a hula hoopish motion. The gyration made me think of stringing parcels from the ceiling so that they swung sympathetically. I was going to make some small Scary Dolls to serve in the shop but decided to have four bigger ones to support the corners of the shop. They are skewered by the vertical crankshafts that drive the roof. I wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea until I realised that these architectural figures were not Caryatids but Scaryatids. They could have stood still but it was easy to make them rotate so I did. Now there was room for only one parcel to hang from the roof – a big one in the form of a trussed-up man. The only unwrapped part of him is his pipe which juts nakedly from his mouth area. I gave each Scaryatid a big strawberry to flaunt – an echo of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. The action is a mixture of regular and haphazard: the roof and the dolls move smoothly. The dangling man is subject to inertia from the roof’s movement but he’s often buffeted as his pipe comes into contact with a doll’s body.” P. Spooner

Height: 50cm
Width: 17cm
Depth: 17cm

Runs from a switched 5v Power Supply with a UK 3 pin plug.
We should be able to supply an adapter if you are outside the UK.