Miniature Appreciation 101: or, Sweating the Small Stuff
by Ellen Freeman
I’m a founding member of the Sindicato de Miniaturistas, S.A. de C.V., an unofficial union of miniature appreciators based in Mexico City who discuss, curate, and document collections of small objects. As the editor of a magazine about secondhand fashion, I spend a lot of time in flea markets and inevitably come home with tiny treasures. Recent acquisitions include a ceramic fox with a paper fortune inside; a one-inch cowboy boot; and a Barbie pink tennis racquet. When I first wrote about the magic of miniatures for Broccoli Magazine, my conclusion was (and still is) that their spell is two-fold: they make us feel big, and they make us feel small. Through this syllabus in two units, I hope to open future miniaturists’ eyes to that special charm of the little things in life.
UNIT #1: WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (To make you feel big.)
Topics:
How shrinking down an everyday object enchants it; how miniatures are a collaboration between the maker and the imagination; how these constructed worlds allow us to explore and articulate identity; how miniatures grant us with divine omnipotence, turn the quotidian into play, externalize interiority, and allow us to dream.
Readings:
“Occupying a space within an enclosed space, the dollhouse’s aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: center within center, within within within. The dollhouse is a materialized secret; what we look for is the dollhouse within the dollhouse and its promise of an infinitely profound interiority.” –Susan Stewart in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1992).
“I feel more at home in miniature worlds, which, for me, are dominated worlds. And when I live them I feel waves that generate world-consciousness emanating from my dreaming self.” –Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958).
Case studies:
Titania’s Palace, Egeskov Castle, Denmark (1922)
Sir Nevile Wilkinson, who created this miniature palace in honor of Her Iridescence Titania, “never lost sight of the fact that his house was intended for fairy habitation. All the bedrooms have cupboards for Sunday dress-up wings, and all the doors are sans handles and doorknobs, wood being no obstruction to fairies. But the palace is as rich in contradiction as it is in eclecticism. Though fairies don’t eat, Sir Nevile provided them with toothbrushes; though they neither walk nor climb, he provided them with glorious staircases…The private chambers best reflect the benevolent, even sentimental rulers of this fairy kingdom. In Oberon’s study, in addition to his cello and chessmen, is a tiny piece of the late Princess Mary’s wedding cake in an ivory casket. In Titania’s boudoir, along with her piano and inlaid Louis XV writing desk with a secret drawer, lies the Crystal Tear. Sir Nevile explained: ‘When babies cry because somebody hurts them or because they are hungry and neglected, the first teardrop always disappears: you can never find it, because it goes straight to…Titania’s boudoir.’” –Nancy Akre in Miniatures (1983)
Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago (1935)
Commissioned by a Hollywood silent film flapper with one blue eye and one brown eye and worked on by more than 700 artists, the Fairy Castle was worth more than half a million dollars when it was completed (more than $11 million today). Fantastical details include: a weeping willow that wept into a pool; a working diamond, emerald, and pearl chandelier made from deconstructed jewels from Moore’s personal collection; furniture from the “Early Fairy” period; Cinderella’s tiny blown-glass slippers; a dueling pistol which shoots real silver bullets; a “vase” that’s really an alabaster kohl jar from the ancient Egyptian Tomb of the Kings and another that’s a 1000 year-old Thai porcelain urn; a piano with sheet music handwritten in miniature by Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, and Stravinsky themselves; a polar bear skin rug with an open mouth filled with real mouse teeth.
Carrie Stettheimer’s Dollhouse, The Museum of the City of New York (1916–35)
“In the late 1940’s, a New York art dealer arranging for a Cubism show discovered that the original of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Stair was on the West Coast with no possibility of bringing it East in time. A resourceful man, he remembered that the artist had specially made a copy of his chef d’oeuvre for, of all art galleries, one in a dolls’ house. He borrowed the miniature version right off the small wall of the dolls’ residence and hung it on his full-size wall with his full-size paintings.” –Flora Gill Jacobs in A History of Dolls’ Houses (1965). That mini Duchamp is one of many miniature paintings on the walls of Stettheimer’s charmingly appointed dollhouse, where a maid in an upstairs room is perpetually frozen in shock at having dropped a tray of fine china.
See also:
- Thorne Miniature Rooms (Meticulously crafted samples of architectural history, so realistic that when I posted close-up photos of them on my Instagram stories, people messaged me saying, “Is that your Airbnb?!”)
- Sydney Gore’s deep dive into American Girl Minis
- Snail World by Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland
- Casa Mazarassa
- Dejima, Nagasaki
- The flea circus scene from Jurassic Park
UNIT #2: ZOOM LENS (To make you feel small.)
Topics:
How a change in scale allows us to see with fresh eyes and awakens wonder; how zooming in amplifies an object’s emotional power; how reduction magnifies; how miniatures invite us in, transport us through time and space, and reveal worlds within worlds—and the awe, terror, and empowerment that those produce.
Readings:
Excerpt from Margaret Cavendish, “A World in an Ear-Ring” (1653):
An earring round may well a zodiac be,
Wherein a sun goes round, which we don’t see;
And planets seven about that sun may move,
And he stand still, as learnèd men would prove;
And fixed stars like twinkling diamonds, placed
About this earring, which a world is, vast.
That same which doth the earring hold, the hole,
Is that we call the North and Southern Pole;
There nipping frosts may be, and winters cold,
Yet never on the lady’s ear take hold.
And lightning, thunder, and great winds may blow
Within this earring, yet the ear not know.
Fish there may swim in seas, which ebb and flow,
And islands be, wherein do spices grow;
There crystal rocks hang dangling at each ear,
And golden mines as jewels may they wear.
There earthquakes be, which mountains vast down fling,
And yet ne’er stir the lady’s ear, nor ring.
Excerpt from How Do You Live?, a 1935 children’s novel by Genzaburo Yoshino which Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement to adapt as his last film (called The Boy and the Heron in English). The protagonist, Copper, and his uncle stand looking down at the Ginza streets from the rooftop of a department store, a miniaturizing gaze which transforms Copper’s worldview, “a change in Copper’s heart…unlike anything that had happened to him before”:
Gazing down in silence, Copper began to imagine that the individual cars were insects. If they were bugs, he thought, they would be rhinoceros beetles. They’re a swarm of rhinoceros beetles that comes crawling in a big hurry. Then once they’ve done their job, they go hurrying home. There’s no knowing what it’s about, but to them great affairs are happening, make no mistake.
…
When he came to, for some reason, Copper shivered. Those little roofs packing the earth just like sardines—under those innumerable roofs were any number of human beings! While that was a natural thing, at the same time, when he thought it over, it gave him a sort of scary feeling.
Right now, beneath Copper’s very eyes, as well as in places he couldn’t even see, some hundreds of thousands of people were living. How many different sorts of people were there? What were they all doing now, while Copper watched from above? What were they thinking? It was an unpredictable and chaotic world … Below them, without a shadow of a doubt, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people were thinking their own thoughts, doing their own things, and living their lives. Yes, and those people, every morning, every evening, were rising and falling like the tides.
Copper felt as if he were drifting into a big whirlpool.
“Hey, Uncle—”
“Yes?”
“People are…” Starting to speak, Copper turned a bit red. But he pulled himself together and spoke. “People are… Well, they seem a little like water molecules, don’t you think so?”
…
Copper couldn’t help feeling that somewhere unbeknownst to him, there were eyes watching him steadily. He even had the distinct impression that he could see his own figure reflected in those eyes—on a seven-story building in the hazy gray distance, a small, small figure standing on a rooftop!
Copper had an odd feeling. The watching self, the self being watched, and furthermore the self becoming conscious of all this, the self observing itself by itself, from afar, all those various selves overlapped in his heart, and suddenly he began to feel dizzy. In Copper’s chest something like a wave began to pitch and roll. No, it felt as if Copper himself were pitching and rolling.
Then, in the city spreading boundless before him, the invisible tide welled up to its highest point. Before he knew it, Copper had become just another droplet inside that tide.
Case Studies
Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (1940s–50s)
A police captain/grandmother obsessively crafted eighteen 1:12-scale forensic scenes to teach students how to investigate real murder cases and “find the truth in a nutshell.” In them, “calendars are turned to the correct month and year that victims died; tiny keys fit into doors that can actually be locked and unlocked; and even a fingernail-sized mousetrap works. A miniature rocking chair rocks exactly three times when it was pulled back to a 45-degree angle, to meet with specifications from the real-life crime scene.” Corrine May Botz’s The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (2004) investigates each case in minute detail.
Eye Miniature, artist unknown (early 19th century)
|The Eye Miniature at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is displayed in a darkened room; as you step in front of it, a shaft of light focuses your attention onto a tiny painting of a single blue eye surrounded by 20 pearls and shedding two diamond tears. “Eye miniatures were a curious but brief anomaly in miniature painting that came into fashion at the end of the 18th century. They were an extremely intense manifestation of an already emotionally charged art, apparently an attempt to capture ‘the window of the soul’, the supposed reflection of a person’s most intimate thoughts and feelings.”
Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber (1999–present)
Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber’s miniatures imagine post-anthropocene futures—a library with a tree growing through the roof, a Chernobyl-ish beauty shop ravaged by time, an abandoned aquarium—through dioramas that at once remove humans from their outsized place at the center of the world and place the end of the world literally and metaphorically into human hands. “Pictures enable us to imagine something as something—in the sense of a scene. This is made possible through the alternation of closeness and distance—and is also valid for experiences in extreme situations, such as a disaster or even the Apocalypse…We should not forget that the death of the world as we know it, its end which we see in so-called disaster pictures, is only a perceived and thus preliminary ending. We will not experience our real end, because the event will happen before we realize it.” –Timo Skrandies, “The Resilience of Nature—The Art of Resilience: Lorix Nix in the Anthropocene”
Charles Simonds, Dwellings (1970–present):
Charles Simonds builds miniature clay dwellings and temples into sidewalk curbs, brick walls, construction sites, and windowsills in cities around the world, leaving them to be discovered by passersby like the ruins of an imaginary nomadic civilization of “Little People.” “Simonds challenges the notion of a work of art as a discrete and precious object and confronts traditional boundaries between the museum and the outside world,” imbuing forgotten corners with meaning and exploring how a change in scale grants access and invitation.
Hagop Sandaljian, The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles:
The prophetic Egyptian-born Armenian-American artist carved exquisite miniatures “fashioned from slivers of human hair and motes of dust and glue,” so tiny you need a microscope to see them. In his microminiatures that relate “not to fantasy but to metaphysics,” Mickey Mouse balances on top of the point of one needle, Napoleon Bonaparte is dressed for battle in the eye of another, and nine tropical birds perch on a strand of his baby grandson’s hair. “Inhabiting the margins between dream and reality, these figures of impossible dimensions appear at once banal and elusive, meticulously crafted and dreamily insubstantial. Each nearly weightless sculpture seems to hover between its slim hold on the material plane and the lucid and immeasurable reality of a mental image. Straddling the line between science, craft, art, and novelty, Sandaldjian’s work befuddles our ability to make such distinctions, and in so doing, opens a space for wonder.”
See Also:
- Movies: The galaxy within a cat’s collar from Men In Black; Honey I Shrunk the Kids
- Books: Zoom by Istvan Banyai; The Minpins by Roald Dahl; The Borrowers by Mary Norton
- TokyoBuild
- Yosafat Delgado Mandujano
- Children’s Point of View Café in Tokyo