iDolls is a series of digitally constructed composite images examining the processes through which bodies are idealised, commodified and circulated as images — and the cultural machinery, hiding in plain sight, that reproduces those ideals from the earliest age.

The title combines the consumer technology prefix — the i of products designed to be desired, owned and eventually superseded — with doll: the object that has historically both reflected and reproduced particular ideas about femininity, beauty and display. Version 1.0. As if the body were a product in a line. As if there were updates to come.

The three works in the series develop that logic across two generations of template. iDoll v1.0 introduces the series' central question: what it means when a person becomes indistinguishable from the image made of her. iDoll v2.1 and v2.2 introduce the specifics of the Barbie doll — since 1959, one of the most widely distributed templates for the idealised female body in history, with proportions physically impossible in reality and feet permanently cast in the position that accepts high heels. She cannot stand flat on the ground. She was designed this way for children. iDoll v2.2 places the female doll in direct comparison with Action Man — the name alone encodes the cultural script. Where the female doll offers five points of articulation, the male doll is jointed at feet, knees, hips, wrists, elbows, shoulders and neck. One doll is built for display. The other is built for action. This is not a subtle distinction. It has been manufactured at scale and sold to children for decades without being named for what it is.

iDolls is the final series in the Disguises body of work, following My Luxuria and Pygmalion's Prize — a continuum that has traced the visual economies of femininity from the Renaissance nude through five centuries of western art to the plastic template in the toy aisle.

The boundary between person and object is the subject of this work.