Carefully staged photographic scenes where nostalgia, ritual, and the uncanny quietly intersect—made by hand, not by machines.
Hills Have Dolls — A Manifesto
We are the dolls — trapped in a nostalgia loop, replaying scenes from a past that never quite existed.
These aren’t portraits of toys. They’re echoes of childhood rehearsed until the memory feels real.
Each photo is a psychodrama: a reconstruction of a feeling, a season, a moment you can almost remember but can’t quite place.
I grew up without real photo albums — just stray pictures sliding out of drawers and Bibles.
That’s how I learned memory is fragile. It disappears unless someone rebuilds it. So I built a new archive—vinyl, fabric, and light. A world where forgotten innocence keeps trying to wake up.
Cecily makes the clothes. I build the world around them.
Together we resurrect moments that might have been — half sacred, half absurd.
A séance disguised as playtime.
The Hills Have Dolls is what happens when childhood survives its own ending.
When nostalgia becomes architecture.
When ghosts decide to pose for the camera.
Where do memories go when no one remembers anymore?
Here. They come here.
We are the dolls — trapped in a nostalgia loop, replaying scenes from a past that never quite existed.
These aren’t portraits of toys. They’re echoes of childhood rehearsed until the memory feels real.
Each photo is a psychodrama: a reconstruction of a feeling, a season, a moment you can almost remember but can’t quite place.
I grew up without real photo albums — just stray pictures sliding out of drawers and Bibles.
That’s how I learned memory is fragile. It disappears unless someone rebuilds it. So I built a new archive—vinyl, fabric, and light. A world where forgotten innocence keeps trying to wake up.
Cecily makes the clothes. I build the world around them.
Together we resurrect moments that might have been — half sacred, half absurd.
A séance disguised as playtime.
The Hills Have Dolls is what happens when childhood survives its own ending.
When nostalgia becomes architecture.
When ghosts decide to pose for the camera.
Where do memories go when no one remembers anymore?
Here. They come here.
The Artistic Philosophy
Beauty as the instrument of unease
There is nothing artificial about the unease you may feel looking at this work. No fake blood. No disfigurement. No manufactured shock. The dolls are beautiful. The light is careful. The costumes are handmade with love. Everything is exactly as it should be — and that is precisely the problem.
Sugar and spice and everything nice, turned by your own memory into something you cannot quite name. The uncanny valley is not a trick deployed here. It is a condition created and then abandoned — left for the viewer to inhabit alone. I build the world. I step out of the way. Whatever horror you find in these images, you brought with you. I only provided a place for it to live.