Dollhouses of Radial Defiance

Making miniatures is rebellion. Conventional wisdom says that miniaturists want to create small worlds in order to gain a sense of control, to play “god” in a tiny invented world. I posit that it is instead an act of humility, one of quietude, attentiveness, and patience that is hard to reconcile with the breakneck speed our culture has adopted. Time spent making miniatures is not about control of other worlds, but about crafting a willful pace for ourselves and those who join us. I liken it to a prayer in a winding labyrinth: walking a labyrinthine pattern is not about getting from one place to another efficiently, but about being present in each slow, deliberate step. Choosing mindfulness over efficiency flies in the face of our cultural values, so that is commonly misunderstood.

It’s easy to see that in the full-scale world our collective attention spans are growing shorter. People read far fewer books and other long-form texts in favor of articles, Twitter threads, short clips of text, and “listicles.” News cycles speed up so quickly that each day’s disaster gets replaced by another before anyone has had time to process and grieve the first. In our online lives, text and photos have given way to constant videos and reels, often with the punchlines or resolutions truncated to a mere fraction of a second. Our social media platforms support shorter, faster, continually more sped-up content.

And yet, in this world of hubbub, stubborn miniaturists hunch over worktables pouring countless hours into details that will only be observable to those who slow down, take their time, and look closely. That seems a radical, beautiful act of defiance. Making miniatures requires opting into a new scale of time as well as scale of size. In miniature, things move slowly: it takes tweezers and a delicate hand to produce crafts that have already been perfected in full scale. We have to measure, to dry fit, to adjust, and then measure again. We have to invent processes, and even new tools. We teach ourselves new techniques, and start again. We drop things on the floor…and start again.

Engaging in this art form is an act of protecting and defending our own attention span, and demanding similar engagement from others. You can not take in an entire dollhouse as a work of art in a moment, or in a single sweeping glance. A dollhouse project will not reveal itself to you while you remain passive, like a video with plot points spelled out in sequence. You will have to let your eyes wander from room to room, peeking through doorways, around furniture, even, in many cases, poking around in drawers. (I know I’m not the only one who stashes secret treasures inside drawers, boxes, and canisters.) A dollhouse tells a narrative that demands the observer to work to participate. The miniaturist leads us through a story, but it’s not linear and can’t be interpreted in a moment.

In the social media community, miniature makers are collectively building a culture that asks us to deliberately put on the brakes. It requires us to slow down, lean in, watch closely. Today, someone is laying a small floor in an impossibly complex parquet pattern. Over here, someone else is taking time to piece together an entire quilt one tiny stitch at a time. Over there, they’re building ten layers of paint to make a surface look like it’s been weathering for a hundred years. These are tasks of patience and attentiveness.

The defiance of dollhouse-makers is financial as well: capitalism demands that artists constantly monetize our free time, that we make everything we do “productive” and add value. The miniature community sees this as well—the public perception is that if a person labors at an endeavor, the results must automatically be up for sale. And yet dollhouses often are valued at far less than the sum of their parts. Estate sales readily show that a completed, furnished dollhouse brings in more in sales when the furniture is separated from its house, because most people prefer creating their own environments rather than adopting someone else’s vision. And yet, dollhouse makers continue to labor on, pouring countless hours into projects that frequently bring no financial reward. To labor for love at any task of production is nearly unheard of in our culture today. And yet…in craft rooms, converted basements, and kitchen tables all over the world, we steadily pursue the perfect shingle pattern, the right dado rail and crown molding combination, or the precisely curved cabriole chair leg.

We are, collectively, forcing ourselves to slow down, step aside, get out of the rat race, for at least as long as we are engaged in our craft. “Watching paint dry” is the idiom for doing the most boring thing possible, and yet here we are, engaging in projects layered with drying paint and glue, and not only that: taking pictures of it, and sharing it with others, so that we can all share these slow, deliberate steps with one another. We watch and encourage each other, admiring the difference between the 8th layer of paint and the 9th, sitting vigil with each other waiting for 3D printers to complete their circuit or for supplies to arrive in the mail from elusive sources, we join each other in long lists of “willfully boring” activities that say “slow down, take a moment, look closely, pay attention, wait.”