David Hancock: Dolls, Myths and Museum Objects 

Jo Manby

Jo Manby responds to artist and PAPER Gallery director David Hancock’s exhibition, ‘A Still Life’, which runs until 19 September 2021 at The Whitaker in Rawtenstall, Rossendale.

Manchester-based artist David Hancock has a longstanding interest in the studio as a sacred, mythical chamber of experimentation and transformation, on the threshold between the artist’s inner world and the external world beyond the studio walls.

Several years ago, Hancock embarked upon a huge body of work based on cosplay subculture. Cosplay, referencing costume and play, describes a cross between performance art and activity where participants wear clothes and accessories to represent a certain character. Through this, he came across a subset of cosplayers who collect dolls and dress them as if they were mini avatars of themselves. These ball-jointed dolls (BJDs) are used by another community too, mainly adult collectors and customisers, members of the loosely termed ‘BJD culture’. The dolls come ‘blank’ so that they can be painted, dressed and accessorized by their owner. Collectors often design and photograph them in dioramas, creating and maintaining online personas for them. 

In an interview with Hancock for this feature, he described how he began to order his own BJDs off the internet: ‘I liked the idea of being able to create a version of yourself that you can place in a particular environment.’ He began to set up still-lives and to populate them with BJDs, objects, house plants and magazine cut-outs. He places his still lives in a wooden box that he constructed for the purpose. It’s a space where he can experiment and explore, within the confines of the studio. He also mentions that he had tired of painting from photographs and that this was a way of painting from life.

The BJD craze finds a parallel in the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Pygmalion the sculptor viewed women as flawed and devoted himself instead to his work. He created Galatea, a beautiful marble statue of a woman and fell in love with it, dressing the statue in fine clothes and jewellery, bringing it gifts of shells, beads, songbirds and flowers. Aphrodite, goddess of love, took pity on Pygmalion. When he visited her temple, she sent a sign of three flames. On his return to his studio he embraced the statue, which Aphrodite brought to life. 

Hancock often recreates scenes from art history using the BJDs, including that of Pygmalion and Galatea. However, it is not so much the stories that interest Hancock, as the aesthetics and compositional tropes that have long surrounded them. That, and the opportunity to highlight, or subvert, counter-narratives. In his version of this frequently depicted theme, it’s Galatea and Pygmalion – the names and the genders reversed. Using the medium of watercolour on paper, he depicts Pygmalion in the form of a female doll that gestures towards a painted magazine photo of a half-draped boy model as Galatea, the cut-out standing on a 3-D miniature pedestal loaned from The Whitaker’s collection.

There’s something magical about Hancock’s current exhibition, ‘A Still Life’, at The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery in Rossendale; about coming into a white gallery space with these multifaceted, iridescent images glowing off the walls.  There are 22 paintings in the exhibition, all centred on the theme of avatars amidst still lives and painted in watercolour, with some additions of gouache. The earliest works date from 2017; the most recent are from this year and were made especially for the show. The scattered, vibrant granularity that Hancock paints with gives a digital, computer-like surface to his work. Cohesive, consistent, unifying. But despite this sheen of modernity, viewing the exhibition is also like stepping into a church with stained glass illuminated from the outside by brilliant sunshine. 

The Whitaker has recently been refurbished, and its traditional displays of taxidermy and other historic artefacts reinterpreted. Hancock’s exhibition is one of two contemporary shows that launch the makeover. He usually sources the ‘props’ that feature in his painted diorama scenes from eBay or charity shops. But on this occasion, the museum invited him to interpret objects from its collections. He explains how this felt appropriate to him as ‘a lot of the compositions I was drawing from for this show were from paintings in northern collections,’ and several of the objects he chose to reference are also presented within the exhibition space itself. Hancock is interested in northern collections as they contain many paintings from ‘that period of empire where there’s the Pre-Raphaelites, the Aestheticists and the Symbolists, escapist movements during a period of huge industrialisation and technological advancement.’

Hancock is very much aware that the art on show in northern art galleries represents the taste of rich mill owners, who bought much of the contemporary art that was available at the time in Britain. Fascinatingly, he recently traced his family tree back to Bakewell, from where his antecedents moved to Manchester to work in the cotton factories. ‘The people who were running those factories were buying this kind of art, so it feels like it’s part of my heritage’, he explains. ‘I do feel quite a close connection to that period of art and to works that feature heavily in northern art galleries and museums.’

Hancock aligns his work with the type of escapist, idealised world view favoured by the Victorians, but is at the same time aware of the contested aspects of the era. ‘I had the chance to go to The Whitaker to have a look at the stores. Going round the collection, it’s quite problematic. You’ve got dead animals that are incredibly rare or in some cases extinct. One of the objects I used [in Orpheus and the Wild Beasts, 2020] is a brown glazed ceramic bear holding a dog, and relates to bearbaiting in the past.’ This kind of cruelty to animals made him wonder: ‘How should we be looking at these objects now, with this history of exploitation? A lot of things are up for questioning. I don’t think anyone has the definitive answer.’

In The Hireling Shepherd (1851) by Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt, owned by Manchester Art Gallery, a young man ignores his flock, preferring to dally with a country girl, surreptitiously putting his arm around her as he shows her a death’s-head hawkmoth. Hunt painted his version in the Surrey countryside along with Sir John Everett Millais, who painted his famous work, Ophelia (1851-2), in the Tate Collection, there too. On the surface, these paintings may have an innocent air, but both hint at disturbing violations of natural order. The hireling intrudes into the personal space of the young woman, whose response is ambiguous, while his sheep stray over a boundary into a wheat field. Ophelia, singing songs and wreathed in wildflowers, is on the verge of drowning, suffering from grief and madness.

Hancock is drawn to the idea of transgression and retains these ambiguities in his version of The Hireling Shepherd (2020). However, he says of works like these that ‘it’s all escapist to some extent. I’m interested in the paintings themselves rather than the subject matter.’ His version of Hercules and Omphale (2020) focuses on the shifting of gender within the character of Hercules, with whom Hancock identifies himself in his version. Hancock explains how, according to myth, Omphale takes Hercules’s lion skin and club ‘and makes him wear a negligée and perform what is essentially women’s work – sewing.’ Another disruption of the ‘natural order’: emasculation of a hero; cross-dressing; role playing. 

Similarly, in The Briar Rose (Sleeping Knights) (2019), where Hancock paints magazine cut-outs of cross dressing and fetish outfits along with a BJD wearing an armour formed from grey seashells, there are references to the cycle of four large paintings by Edward Coley Burne-Jones based on the Brothers Grimm fairytale of the sleeping princess. Some readings of the works interpret them as referring to Burne-Jones’s friendship with the poet Algernon Swinburn, for whom he illustrated his sado-masochist verse. The paintings certainly radiate homoeroticism and sensuality as the knights lie in a suspended aesthetic dreamworld.

Another question I had for Hancock was about the white space in his work. Was it like the end of a game sequence in a virtual world, where you just drop off the edge of a cliff? What did the white space represent? ‘I started to use the white space when I started making work about cosplayers,’ he explained. ‘It was about the viewer not being party to what the cosplayers themselves could visualise in their world. You could see them but not what was going on in their imagination… Then I started to incorporate real objects with the cosplayers to point to this idea of synecdoche – a whole represented by a part. In the current work on show at The Whitaker the white space refers to the studio; the space that the viewer is not party to. It’s not just a physical space, it’s a mental space as well. It’s where the creative process happens.’  

I ask him about an assertion he made in an academic paper back in 2019 that we are living in a period on the cusp between the real world and the digital, but where people are not yet willing to relinquish the former. ‘I think a lot of what we do is mediated through the digital,’ says Hancock. ‘Most of my work is seen online and that’s how most people view and appreciate it. When I present it online, I do edit it in Photoshop so it looks a particular way.’ White backgrounds do not photograph well; even though Hancock uses premium quality high white bleached watercolour paper, ‘it always looks dirty. I go round with a white pen on Photoshop and white out the paper, and you end up brightening it a bit so it’s balanced.’ It’s not a matter of prettifying, he explained; more of getting as close to the original images as possible.

‘A lot of what we do fits between the virtual and the physical as an artist. I suppose for the community with the dolls, some of the dolls exist online as real beings. The collectors give them identities – and who’s to say that the identity of a doll online is less than the online identity of a real person?’ Within these hybrid real/virtual environments, there is scope for endless permutation as much as maintenance of control. In a way, Hancock’s works document the way in which we stand on this cusp, treading a paper-thin line between realms.