Art Dolls
One-of-a-kind poseable figures, hand-made in Plzeň. Wire-armatured, articulated at the joints — built to hold a pose.
Each figure is built around a wire armature. Head, hands and feet are sculpted from polymer clay; the body and clothing are textile. Nothing is cast or repeated — every doll is made once.
Most of them stand unsupported and keep the pose you give them. Some are made to hang instead — the winged ones were never meant to carry their own weight. Which is which is always stated.
Jana Pszczólková trained in applied painting at the Zámeček art school in Plzeň and has been making dolls for over twenty years. She also works in stop-motion animation, as founder and creative director of Bobeš Anima — which is why her figures are built the way the medium demands rather than the way an ornament would be.
Her work was given a solo exhibition at the Prácheň Museum in Písek in 2012, and in 2015 she showed at Doll Prague, an international collectors' doll exhibition held at the Slovanský dům in Prague. She is listed in the Archive of Fine Arts, the Czech register of contemporary artists — as an illustrator first; the dolls came later. The surname is Polish for little bee.
Twenty years of work, most of it in other people's hands by now. See the archive →
The first collection for sale is being photographed. If you would like to hear when it opens, write and you will be told first.
Correspondence in English is handled by Vojtěch Pszczólka.
vojtech@pszczolka.cz