Notes from London

When I was a teenager, one of my first paid jobs enabling me to rent my own flat, was as a model for a mannequin company called Adel Rootstein. It was not just any company within the field. They prided themselves on making shop window dummies based on real people. Or in truth, models and actresses.

Their sculptor, John, re-created life-size replicas of me in clay before these were cast in fibre-glass. Every part of my body was scrutinized, measured, and compared using calipers. My memories are more of the lovely philosophical conversations John and I had whilst he created my döppelgangers, than of the reality that I had anorexia at the time. Ironically, this was necessary in order for me to even get a job like that — to meet the industry criteria.

When, many years later, healthy in body and spirit, I dropped by to say hello to John, one of the first things he said was, “Oh, you put on weight.” Luckily, the conversations questioning life and art, rather than those warped ideas about feminine standards, were what I took with me into my future.

Barbie®: The Exhibition, sets out to celebrate the progression of Barbie, and stylistically, yes, there is her ingenuity in navigating the decades to enjoy. Yet, unwittingly, the show also reveals how little has changed, through Mattel's dependence on presenting Barbie's outer image, exaggerated beauty, and consumption of symbols of wealth, to make continual, successful sales.  

As Uddenberg’s work explores, an underlying persisting narrative is one where women’s sexuality, desirability, and power lie in being viewed and valued as a commodity to be packaged and fed back to society. To serve as reflections, but also consumers, of unrealistic collective fantasies.