A Complicated Relationship: Amber Hawk Swanson And Sex Dolls

A much younger Amber Hawk Swanson once painted and drew during all her free time growing up on the Mississippi River in suburban Iowa. And she would play with a doll that looked remarkably like her.She also dreamed of something big. She wanted to explore beyond her beloved Iowa. She wanted to break away from traditional artistic confines.

It wouldn’t be until graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago when she would find performance art, trade in the Midwest for Brooklyn, and truly discover herself and her mission.

“It has taken a decade to really unfold all of this,” Ms. Hawk Swanson, now 34, said on Monday evening, just a half hour after arriving at The Watermill Center as the laboratory’s current artist in residence. “I think I’ve always known what I was up to has a lot of layers, and it has taken many years to really reveal them to what is now a wide online audience.”

Her work, she carefully explained, is sometimes “challenging” for people to experience, or even discuss. After all, she deals mostly in lifelike silicone sex dolls—most recently reconstructing them into sculptures of captive whales—with a running commentary on the doll ownership community, feminism, secrecy, and a “woman’s own participation in a cultural narrative that declares them objects,” she said.

It all began in 2005. Ms. Hawk Swanson had just completed a series of videos, “The Feminism Project,” that sexualized the artist in an extreme way by referencing mainstream pornography. And the reaction startled her. The audience opened up, sharing stories of sexual violence and trauma with her.

“Interestingly, at that time, there was a heightened attention toward doll ownership,” Ms. Hawk Swanson said, “and an equal number of feminist blogs that denounced this community, that talked about them as a group that was f---ing something that wouldn’t talk back. They talked about these doll owners as super-misogynist and really painted them with one negative brush.”

Ms. Hawk Swanson was intrigued.

She found a doll community online forum and lurked in the background, reading the posts and, eventually, making some friends. She used the negative stereotype to her advantage, she said, in order to ask the hard questions. But in order to really do so, the artist realized she needed more. “To participate really meant for me to participate in the work,” she said. “I had to be able to explore the questions. It seemed like this all had powerful potential.”

In 2006, she commissioned the fabrication of “Amber Doll,” a RealDoll made in the 6-foot-tall, dark-haired artist’s likeness, who became her artistic and romantic companion for five years. She said her failed attempts at dating “organic” women—as the doll community calls them—helped her identify with the group’s “doll husbands,” their fear, loneliness and frustration, and afforded her a deeper understanding of a world she says she previously misjudged.

“There was a point where I started imagining this doll could start to fulfill some of my emotional needs, which is what I observed was happening in the community,” she said. “And now I understand that really differently. I understood that, often, the dolls are what bring the community together, and, often, the emotional needs are met by the community.”

Amber Doll and Ms. Hawk Swanson lived a performance for two years—disrupting wedding receptions, roller-skating rinks, football tailgating parties, theme parks and adult industry conventions—before, in 2011, the artist broadcast the 10-day transmogrification of her doll’s body into a replica of Tilikum, a bull orca living in captivity at SeaWorld Orlando that has been involved in three human deaths.

Three years to date from “Amber Doll > TILIKUM,” Ms. Hawk Swanson will stage “Doll Closet,” a seven-day broadcast performance, beginning Wednesday, December 10, at The Watermill Center. It picks up where the artist’s second livestream, “LOLITA,” left off: She constructed a replica of Lolita, the oldest living killer whale in captivity, from two dolls donated by their longtime partners and owners, Davecat and Jesse.

During “LOLITA,” Jesse revealed to Ms. Hawk Swanson that he had hidden his doll, Heather, inside a secret room of his 1940s colonial-style home in rural Ohio for 15 years, protected by a complicated locking mechanism inspired by a bank vault, before donating her to the artist. No one ever found Heather. Not even his wife, before she died.

Every day for the next week, Ms. Hawk Swanson will rebuild the hidden room, piece by piece, with a great deal of help from Jesse. He will call in at noon—excluding Saturday and Sunday—with guidance, commentary and detailed instructions.

“Part of the reason I’m able to collaborate with Jesse is because I understand that place [the Midwest] and I understand what it feels like to live somewhere you don’t feel you can be out about all parts of your personality,” Ms. Hawk Swanson said. “I don’t consider him to be a misogynist. To my understanding, he wants to be the doll. I think that is the secret. I think that’s what he’s hiding in the closet, more so than the physical doll.”

The duration of each livestream will vary, the artist said. One particular session during “Amber Doll > TILIKUM” lasted 26 hours, she said. The Olympic powerlifting she practices in her spare time may help with the durational aspect of the performances, she said, but it does not assist with the building itself. “Luckily, The Watermill Center has a lot of tools, which I don’t know how to use,” she said. “I know I have to go to Home Depot to get a grinder, and that feels confusing.”

She laughed nervously, and continued, “Because I work with silicone sex dolls, there’s the implication that something sexual will happen. But for many years, very little sexual content has made its way into my work. I’m interested in playing with that expectation and not actually providing anything sexual.

“What’s so interesting about the community of doll owners I hang out with is that their relationship with their dolls isn’t necessarily sexual. It’s about a lot of other things. And that’s what I want to explore.”

Amber Hawk Swanson will perform “Doll Closet” through Wednesday, December 17, at 11 a.m. every day from The Watermill Center in Water Mill. A rehearsal open to the public will be held on Saturday, December 13, from 4 to 6 p.m. To watch the performance live, visit livestream.com/amberhawkswanson.