Last week I wrote about attending the national miniatures convention; I still haven’t left, lingering an extra day or two on the way home from Cincinnati to see the private collection of a talented miniaturist friend in Cleveland. It was a whirlwind week, and made me think about the miniaturist hobby/profession/art form overall. I don’t think many people realize what’s going on in this niche universe. It’s not a bunch of children playing with, or blue-haired old ladies sitting at a dining room table making furniture for, dollhouses. There’s much more going on than play, or even hobby. Since the pandemic especially, there’s been a resurgence in the interest and passion for miniatures. And the level of talent of artisans in the industry is exponential.
In an article for NPR, Alina Hartounian writes: “Why is social media so smitten by a working scaled-down sink, or books with printed words too small to read with the naked eye? The answer is as complex as some of the miniature-scapes themselves, according to experts and miniaturists.” One miniaturist she interviewed, Amanda Kelly from Arizona, described: “It's definitely about control. It's like when you play The Sims or some sort of simulation game where you have control of everything that happens in this little space, in this little world that you're creating."
As I attended a national miniatures show, toured not one but two miniatures museums in Kentucky, and visited one of the best private collections in the nation, control’s an interesting concept. As Simon Garfield said in The Guardian, “The ability to enhance a life by bringing scaled-down order and illumination to an otherwise chaotic world—a world over which we may otherwise feel we have little control—cannot be overvalued.” As a miniaturist, I’m new to the game, joining my first club and completing my first builds less than a year ago. As a beachcomber, I was already a fan of finding the tiniest treasures on the beach. As a candlemaker, I’m now a miniature candlemaker. As a gardener, I’m now a miniature gardener. As someone who’s made gingerbread houses my whole life, I make miniature gingerbread houses. In attending my first miniatures convention, I learned how much there is to learn.
What’s cool about miniatures is taking the things you love and “putting them in the dryer,” or creating tiny versions of them. Control seems like an odd way to describe creativity; I find the more we realize we don’t have too much of it, the happier we are, but I know people who are “huge” fans of the genre. We’re all built differently and the key is always tolerance for those differences. I think it’s neat to see miniaturists’ personalities reflected in their work: otherwise there’s a danger in that same Colonial or Victorian dollhouse looking like everyone else’s. And in miniatures we do control the tiny environments we build—from the construction of the walls and paint and accessories and decor, we make hundreds of decisions within small spaces when maybe we aren’t always able to do that in a full-sized world.
When I’m viewing a museum or collection, I look for what’s different. Everything from a collection of nursery rhymes in miniature to Princess Diana’s ancestral home Spencer House stun at the Kentucky Gateway Museum’s KSB Miniatures Collection complete with a tiny portrait of Diana underway in an upper floor room. At the Great American Dollhouse Museum in Kentucky, where the social history of America is depicted in miniature, there’s an exhibit on the Underground Railroad; you can see everything from Harriet Tubman’s house to hidden rooms in dollhouses where slaves are hiding. There’s a scene in one house where a man’s falling down the steps, pieces of a toy train are flying, the Victorian wife is aghast, a maid listens on the other side of the wall. Capturing action isn’t accomplished often in miniature and it’s a great artistic moment.
Miniatures are unique when they spark emotion. The ones I admire most are those that create a feeling: nostalgia, sadness, joy, laughter. In the Danville museum, I loved the “wrong side of town” area with its abandoned houses, morgue and disrepair, because they were real. I love miniaturists who capture grit, reality and things that aren’t always Colonially perfect, perhaps without highly skilled walnut inlay, but by recreating the crisp details in an exact snapshot of time versus another carbon copy of museum perfection and perfectly polished silver.
Of all the miniature vignettes and houses and beautiful artisan work I saw this past week, my favorite was something pretty simple because it reminded me of a favorite childhood book The Little House: two women on a porch of a little house surrounded by “progress” and development, “holdouts,” the "still not for sale" sign out front as they refuse to sell their house to the real estate developer standing on their porch (in photo, at the Great American Dollhouse Museum, Danville, Kentucky. Artist: Alma Kiss).