Abstract
In 1823, Daguerre and Bouton brought their invention to the UK – the diorama. Huge, back-lit canvases appeared to come ‘alive’ and offer audiences ‘through-views’ of the world. Here, I present ethnographic data on how contemporary dioramas at the other end of the scale – the miniature – are made, and how this affords makers ‘through-views’ of life. I describe how three UK-based practitioners create scaled-down three-dimensional dioramas of home. According to them, the diorama is a genre of miniaturisation that best enables them to narrativise scenes of life emplaced in the home: places where interiority, exteriority, space and time intertwine in complex ways that practitioners deem fundamental to life-making. Life's intricacy is best captured at small scale, they suggest, as shrinking requires retaining and incorporating the macro into the micro. I argue miniaturists form dioramas of the home not only because they come to life for audiences but because this particular process of form-giving also transforms makers themselves – offering bodily catharsis, repair and therapy as they too, come
Introduction
On 29 September 1823,
The arrival of such phantasmagoria to the UK was the result of a partnership between the French set designer, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and French landscape artist, Charles Marie Bouton (Boyce, 2022). They pioneered the diorama in Paris in 1822, and it was so successful that soon after the opening of the Regent's Park theatre, more Daguerre-Bouton dioramas enraptured audiences in Liverpool, Manchester, Dublin and Edinburgh (Boyce, 2022). What set the diorama apart from its predecessors (such as panorama paintings – large circular canvases which offer an all-encompassing 360 degree view of landscapes (Boyce, 2022; Ludwig, 2017)) was the immersive, almost hallucinatory experiences they elicited in their viewers, drawing people in with their realistic ‘effect[s] of nature’ (Tresch, 2011). Specifically, the diorama was experienced, by audiences, as ‘coming to life’; ‘making the scenes uncannily ‘alive’ and achieving a sense of ‘being there’ [being most] important to Daguerre and Bouton’ (Huhtamo, 2023: 145).
Since its inception, the term diorama has undergone a number of transformations from its original patented definition (Wonders, 1993) and debate still ensues about exactly what constitutes a diorama (Ludwig, 2017). By the early twentieth century, the term came, in Euro-American contexts at least, to refer, more often, to three-dimensional (3D), life-size or miniature models which present natural environments or historical events and are frequently found behind glass in public spaces such as museums (either natural history of anthropological – see Etienne and Miller, 2021) or art galleries (e.g.
The primary data presented here was collected during an anthropological research project that I conducted between 2022 and 2024,
Accordingly, I spent two years immersing myself as deeply as possible in the realm of miniature craft by crafting myself, including through a six-month apprenticeship with a London-based model maker; participant observation through attending various courses, classes, craft fairs and events, as well as making with my participants, mostly in their homes and workshops; and finally through 45 in-depth interviews with makers and stakeholders that focussed on their processes and techniques of making, as well as how, why and to what effect they make. While there is a real diversity evident in contemporary miniature craft, here, I focus on just three makers who craft scaled-down dioramas of living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms and back yards, because all of these makers emphasised the idiosyncrasies of this genre, that, while in some ways chimed with general themes that emerged in my research, also appeared particular to their practice making dioramas compared to other sorts of miniatures, and therefore to the effect this form of miniature craft had on their own lives.
In what follows, I describe how these practitioners do indeed make dioramas that ‘come to life’ but argue that this is only made possible because, in the process of making, they too, engage a processual act of ‘coming
Abi, Isla and Graham each describe the elements they see as distinctive to dioramas as a miniature genre – features that, in their view, help bring about this sense of revitalisation. First, they explain that dioramas best enable them to express ‘narratives’, ‘vignettes’ and ‘stories’ of life, that both draw on their own personal experiences and imaginations, as well as be inspired by the materials they have at hand to create. The diorama thus provides a ‘through-view’ into life that plays out in the personal, but often hidden, domain of the home; life that makers feel compelled to ‘get out’ and communicate with others, through the setting of ‘scenes’. As a practice, makers describe how this is life-affirming for them; they feel the cathartic, reparative and therapeutic effects of such scene and simultaneous sense making. Second, makers emphasise how dioramas allow them to specifically ‘emplace’ (Howes, 2005) life in the context of the home – places where interiority, exteriority, space and time are condensed within tiny domestic scenes. As such, they describe how they come
Ultimately, what I want to emphasise is that these processes are fundamental to changing how makers feel about and within their own lives. Crafting miniature dioramas of the home necessitates particular ways of approaching, orientating towards and thus coming
In this article, the data is from mostly from in-depth interviews carried out with these three makers. Ethical approval was obtained from University College London and informed prior consent acquired from all participants. Makers explicitly gave consent for their real names to be used in outputs, reflecting their wish for their experiences, identities and artistic work to be adequately acknowledged and represented (Wang et al., 2024). However, to maintain a certain level of privacy around some sensitive experiences and topics that were shared with me, some details have been omitted, paraphrased or compounded, as an act of beneficence on my part. While the stories and experiences presented here chime with wider themes that emerged from my research, I recognise that given the specific focus on just three practitioners, it would be difficult, if not absurd to claim these findings represent ‘universal truths or grand narratives about whole sets of people and their behaviours’ (Sobers, 2023: 5). Rather, I respond to Sobers (2023) appeal for a humbler form of data gathering and presentation; for a (quite literately) ‘small anthropology’ that collects together ‘narrative fragments’ to learn lessons about people's lives from these small instances of storytelling (Sobers, 2023). In doing so, I hope to humbly open up dialogue about the significance that the crafting of miniature dioramas of the home may hold for these makers, and others like them.
Narrativising scenes of Life
‘I've always got these ideas churning in my head – kind of like social commentaries about things that irk me or that I find amusing. I guess I use making miniatures as a way of showcasing narratives about things that I think are important but that people don’t tend to talk about; things I wouldn’t even necessarily say out loud to people that I’d only just met but are always there, going around in my mind. It's almost a way of purging what is inside. The tagline of my business, ‘Visual storytelling showcasing the Unseen, the Flawed and the Forgotten’, epitomises my work, depicting parts people lives that they try to keep hidden on the outside; things that people don’t like to reveal about themselves that often play out in the privacy of the home. It's completely how I've lived my life too, with a mask … I guess miniatures are my way of revealing secrets about myself – things I have felt ashamed of or judged for. It's kind of like telling my past in a way that people don't get freaked out by. It's quite sneaky in a way, but it's also … so cathartic’. Abi.
Abi describes her herself as a self-taught, full-time diorama artist – one that ‘scratch’ builds miniature domestic scenes, 12 times smaller than their real-life counterparts, that play out behind closed doors of private homes – hoarding, addiction, domestic abuse and mental illness. For Abi, the act of creating what she calls ‘personal narratives’ from scraps in her home in Wales, is a simultaneously a process of taming, reconciling and communicating to others what she describes as her ‘wild internal world’. Abi's narratives emanate from a ‘need to purge what is inside [her] head’, a compulsion she feels to get the swathes of internal ‘hidden messages out’. The emphasis she puts on the revelatory nature of these narratives points, not only to the cathartic effect that unmasking such secrets has for her but also to the performative nature of telling, for ‘conveying a secret does not simply reveal what was hidden; it reveals the politics behind it’ (Manderson et al., 2015: 186). In Abi's case, she is explicit that her scenes intentionally deal with social, economic and political issues that she regards as taboo in British society and that she wants to shine a light on and promote ‘conversations’ with others about through her work, echoing the likely didactic use of some early examples of European dollhouses from 16th to 19th centuries (Weston, 2009). She explicitly recognises, as Stewart (1993) does, how miniature houses ‘materialises secrets’, drawing onlookers indoors to the ‘centre within centre, within within within’ (Stewart, 1993: 61): ‘Dolls houses have always had that element of storytelling and I think some of the more traditional makers are still into depicting something as perfectly as possible, as a way of preserving a kind of idealised version of history … Younger people are drastically moving away from that way of living because we see the effect that that it has on our own mental health and even on our parents’ mental health. For us, it's all about breaking those cycles, those paths and those patterns. I think our generation is a lot more willing to actively engage in those sorts of narratives and speak out about difficult issues in public. Younger miniaturists are more into this idea of telling stories and the personal narratives through their pieces. We aren't interested in being perfect anymore, or even portraying that. We are finding tools to do break those silences in society and speak about difficult things, including using dolls houses!’ Abi.
Anthropologists have long been interested in the way people relay narratives about their personal experience – verbalised, visualised and/or embodied framings of a sequence of actual or possible life events, which are simultaneously borne out of experience and give shape to it (Ochs and Capps, 1996). Considered one of primary means through which people tell of, know about and transform the world (MacIntyre, 2007; McQuillan, 2000), a number of scholars have emphasised the potential that communicating about personal and collective experiences through narrative form can have in helping people deal with distress, illness and misfortune in ways that storytellers deem therapeutic, whilst simultaneously paying attention to the historical and cultural contours that shape the specific form and effects such narratives have (Charon, 2006; Good, 1993; Kleinman, 1988; Mattingly, 1994, 2008; Skultans, 2008). The majority of miniaturists that I worked with, even those who made individual items (as opposed to dioramas), emphasised how they aim to ‘tell stories’ with their work. But, for the practitioners featured in this article, it was the diorama in particular, that enabled them to most comprehensively engage in narrativisation due to the emphasis they put on their ability to create whole ‘scenes’ through this medium. In fact, the military historian and miniature modeller Sheperd Paine, emphasises precisely this; that in its most developed form a diorama is a scene that tells a story of an event (Paine, 1980). In a similar vein, for Kermode (1968) narrative expression is precisely the act of making of a scene or ‘eventness’, as through it, we gather significant episodes ( ‘For example, the piece, ‘Always Too Much, Never Enough’ (Figure 1), is a personal narrative. When I was young, I used to have a wicker stool that I absolutely adored. I loved the shape of it; I loved the feeling when you sat on it because it creaked a certain way. I was desperate to have a dressing table to go with it where I could get ready. But, the transition from being a young girl growing into my teenage years was really difficult. I was struck down with a chronic illness when I was 11 which meant I was in bed for most of the time, until I was 15. It was only then that I started going back to school and I had to try and find who I was. I could never find the sweet spot where people accepted me; hence the title. It reflects how I felt back then. When I am making a scene, I get into my own little universe and go back to all those childhood memories to try and remember all the details. The whole way through making this diorama, I was just trying to feel what I felt at that age and connect to those feelings so that I could put all that emotion into the piece. For that, you need to set a whole scene with all the tiny details in it to really tell the story, you sort of see where the emotions, sensations and memories take you – to make sense of all that and put it into the scene’. Abi.
‘Always too much, never enough’, made by Abi, Tobacco and Regrets © Abi Trotman, Tobacco and Regrets.
For Abi, memories of experiences and relationships combine with memories of materials and places to generate narratives that are at once personal and collective; stories that tell about her individual experience and commentaries that tell about society; her dioramas are therefore ‘objects of experience’ (Walczak, 2009) that index ‘life’. Above all, for Abi, dioramas allow her to ‘make sense’ of such experiences
While Abi's emotion-laden narrative scenes tend to connect explicitly to her own life experiences, Isa's narratives come to her through imagining the lives of the fictitious inhabitants of her ‘tiny dioramas’ are living, ‘just at the moment we get to see them in their intimate spaces’ she says. A jeweller and silversmith by training, Isla set up her kitchen table business when she left London for Wiltshire while her children were young and she wanted to be at home more. Now, she delicately crafts her miniature dioramas of home into the interior voids of old objects that she scavenges, finds or buys – shoes, purses, typewriters, clarinets and even eggshells. Like Abi, she not only uses a range of materials to create her scenes including every day recycled items but Isla also makes a point of working with high-quality materials such as semi-precious stones, metals such as brass or steel and woods such as mahogany and walnut, reflecting her past training in metal and more recently woodwork, and her self-described ‘obsession’ with what different materials ‘give you’. She says, ‘I don’t just make big things small, but create vignettes, scenes that tell a story’. For Isla, more than explicitly basing these vignettes on her own personal history, as Abi does, it is the objects and materials she works with, that she predominantly ‘follows’ in ‘flights of fancy’ to create ‘whole scenes’ of lives imagined 72 times smaller than the full-scale world: ‘It's really important to have a narrative that is perfect for the object. So, when I am creating, I start with the object. The object feeds everything I do. What you really want is for it to be as if you've just walked into a room someone has just stepped out of and you're trying to figure out what's happened. In my imagination, I think, “Who lives here”, “What materials would the tiny person have to work with to create the space around them?”, “What would they be doing in this place, just before or just after we get to peer in?” And then I put little storylines in the scenes. For example, in this bantam hen's egg (Figure 2), there is a deck of cards on the table, a cup and plate by the sink, as if someone has just been in there and has stepped out moments before. Classic miniatures are too pristine, they aren’t realistic to me. Dioramas are more like a 3D version of a book; you’re setting a whole scene. Creativity for me, is making something out of nothing, but using your imagination; that's what makes this different for me that other art forms I’ve tried. With miniatures, there is so much opportunity to do that, and it is so liberating because you can go anywhere you want, follow any flight of fancy. It gives me such a thrill to sit down and have the whole world in front of me and think, “What world am I going to make out of these odd bits and bobs”. I literally feel what the space is and what the life behind it is like and I want others to feel that too. So, it is all about the feel and, the story for me’. Isla.
‘The Caravan’, made by Isla, The Borrowed Isle © The Borrowed Isle.
Isla too then, is concerned with narratives, but stresses more strongly how their emergence materialises by following what she has at hand in the process of ‘form-giving’ (Ingold, 2021: 261), combined with her imaginative ‘flights of fancy’. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988) observe, this ‘following’ that Isla engages in is a ‘matter not of iteration but of itineration’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 410) in that, as practitioners like her create, they often engage in a very forward movement of improvisation, following the ways of the world, as they open up during the process of making, rather than to recover a chain of connections, from an end point to a starting point. Rather than necessarily know what she will create and how, Isla, like all the miniaturists I worked with, describe how they engage in active processes of bringing together elements, influences and insights from a range of available resources in a process of repetition, concatenation and recombination (Kavedžija, 2021; Piekut and Lewis, 2016; Smadar Lavie et al., 2018); a form of improvisation that unfolds in time (Ingold and Hallam, 2007), much like the work of the ‘When I’m making, I feel like I’m creating a kind of book with all these wonderful characters in it and I know there is a kind of a wistfulness about it all – saving old things and making them better but I see no appeal in modern things. The objects that I start with tend to be of little value. So, I don't want to restore a Chippendale chair or something. I want to repair things that would ordinarily just be landfill – things coming to the end of their lives that are no longer functional or usable, that don’t mean anything anymore to anyone. And then I give them a new lease of life. I recycle all the objects and the materials I use for the insides; re-purpose old scraps of things – material from clothes or stamps I’ve taken off envelopes, bits of metal from my jewellery making days. For me, it's all about repairing old, damaged, unused things into something more beautiful – making a crappy situation much more romantic … because I’ve had that in my life. I suppose the places I make are quite escapist in that sense’ Isla.
Like Abi then, Isla experiences personal benefit from her craft, a reparative effect that comes from re-purposing and re-constituting. For Tronto and Fisher (1990), repair work is a form of care, given that caring is a ‘species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto and Fisher, 1990: 40). For these authors, world-building or the ‘giving life’ that Isla speaks of entails ‘interweaving components in a complex, life-sustaining web (Tronto and Fisher, 1990). Ingold (2021) too, emphasises the dialogue between life inherent in both maker and material and describes making as a process of people, ‘weaving their own lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld’ (Ingold, 2021: 260). For Ingold (2008), form-making is thus a simultaneous process of life-making. Graham speaks to exactly this dialectic between maker and material; making and living, when, on a rainy afternoon in Coventry, he shows me round his garden workshop and describes his processes of making room boxes of interior, mostly domestic spaces: ‘I come into my shed and put certain music on – stuff that really gets my creativity going. I like music that's creative, like where you don't get it all in the first go. You have to delve into it to work out what things going on – things are really distorted and unclear. That's when I can get into making – It's like my brain switches into a different gear and I can tap into the complexity of detail – I can actually perceive it – that's just how my mind works – then I have to get it all out – get a kind of story out of my head. They aren’t real scenes as such but everything I make has to connect to reality in some way – something I’ve seen or lived or a memory – it's all personal even if it goes in all sorts of directions. I grew up in poverty – so much mess and chaos – so everything I make has a bit of that in it I think, all the muck and grime and blood and shit of life. It's about making something real. It's about expression, sorting through what's going on inside, getting it out and then sharing it’. Graham.
Graham then too, such as Abi and Isla, tells stories of life with his room boxes, that emerge from ‘sorting’ through material that comes from his lived experience, imagination and the resources (whether materials or music) available to him. Graham also emphasises the processual and emergent nature of creativity that, like the others, he experiences as a sort of journey of both making and living. Again, Ingold (2021) highlights how any task is an ensemble of concurrent movements, ‘both within and without the body’ (Ingold, 2021: 74). Grahams miniature scenes express his own experiences with grief, depression and mental illness. Following the unexpected death of his son, making miniatures was one of the ways he found to explore and communicate his own feelings and experiences after retiring from a 50-year career as a butcher, ‘It changed my life, I’d say – as a kind of therapy – and then sharing it with others – that was important too’. As well as highlight the dynamic and therefore transformative effect of making, what Graham articulates here is how this process comes about through acts of ‘delving’ into the complexity, distortion, uncertainty that characterises life; how the making itself entails suspending oneself in the ‘chaos’ of relations. As I go onto describe in the next section, it is precisely this coming into contact with the ‘complexity of detail’ that the diorama affords makers as they both depict and experientially come
Emplacing life at home
As alluded to in the previous section, diorama practitioners in my research engaged in a process of setting scenes in order to express narratives of life. In this section, I expand on how Abi, Isla and Graham emphasise that the diorama allows them to emplace (Howes, 2005) life in the context of the home by conveying the complex and ambiguous way interior, exterior, time and space all interrelate in such places and suggest this is also why this practice brings with it transformative effects on how makers feel. As Graham describes above, making entails
In order to emplace their scenes of life at home, first, makers combine both aspects interiority (inner life) and exteriority (the material world), to capture the ambiguous congruence between both in shaping life. It is no surprise perhaps that these practitioners situate their dioramas in the home. As Mallett (2004) puts it, home is both a material entity and a place of notions, emotions, memories, experiences and imaginations, a place always in-between the real and the ideal. In other words, the ‘home’ is the epitome of both interiority and exteriority. Accordingly, anthropologists have long highlighted how the home is a container, reproducer and mediator of social relations, embodied practices and moral values (Levi-Strauss, 1983; Bourdieu, 1992 [1970]; Sahlins, 1972; Carsten, 1997; Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zuniga, 1999; Helliwell, 1992; Botticello, 2007). The home and homemaking has also been shown to shape human subjectivity to the extent that decoration, furniture and possessions work together to create a sensory totality (Petridou, 2001) through which dwellers express and create their own personal biographies. The home can be a site of resistance (Abu-Lughod, 1990) just as it can be one of peace (Ring, 2006) and possibility (Han, 2012). While not physically inhabited, scholars who have focused their attention on depictions of the home and domestic scenes in literature, poetry and visual art have also been influential in arguing the case that these interiors are ultimately an expression of identity (Bauer and Moran, 2019).
Abi is explicit about her interest in exploring the relationship between interior and exterior as it plays out in the home as for her, giving viewers intimate access to the ‘reality’ of ‘ordinary’, ‘worn-out’, private spaces, is a through view to the similarly ‘imperfect people’ who inhabit them, including herself. She is keen to explore and reveal the domestic interiors as an allegory to exploring and revealing her own identity: ‘I think what I'm most interested in is how a person's material environment reflects who they are and vice versa. What does a private room in their house says about a person? The choices that they make? All the choices that they don't make? If their home is dirty, what does that mean about that person? Or what's does that mean about your interpretation of that person? I just find that fascinating – how people's ability to cope, or not cope, can be seen in how they use their external environment … It's incredible how an ordinary room can reveal someone's life, whether positive or negative. My latest piece, ‘Sick’ (Figure 3) is about my personal physical and mental health issues … It's a depiction of a sink and bathroom cabinets – like all very like pristine, pretty and 1950s but its crammed full of pills and various ointments and God knows what with some pink fluffy slippers on the floor and a little posy of flowers – I wanted to get across this kind of idea of the Stepford wife where everything looks perfect on the outside – she has her copies of Good Housekeeping and lives this great life where she is happy and healthy on the outside – but you look in her bathroom cabinet and you realise that's not the case. She's just functioning because of pharmaceuticals’. Abi.
‘Sick’, made by Abi, Tobacco & Regrets © Abi Trotman, Tobacco & Regrets.
This correspondence between home and identity that Abi speaks of echoes French philosopher musing that, ‘on whatever theoretical horizon we examine it, the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being’ (Bachelard and Jolas, 1994: xxxvi). In a similar vein, scholarship on the use of room boxes and dioramas in art therapy (Galinsky, 2023) suggests the double-sided structure affords clients the ability to explore both inner and outer selves, to reflect on the dialectical but ambiguous relationships between (sometimes chaotic, confusing and uncertain) individual lived experiences and the equally muddled, complex and tentative connections that make up the external world (Galinsky, 2023). Graham too, explores the relation between interior and exterior in a different way to Abi. While Abi depicts the interiors of houses, as a ‘through view’ to inner life, Graham's lens is pointed on their exterior of homes, denying viewers access to what lies behind ‘closed doors and boarded up windows’, highlighting the opacity and ambiguity inherent in quests of ‘knowing’ both persons and places. As he shows me one of his pieces (Figure 4), depicting the back yard of a dishevelled house whose cracked windows are covered in newspaper from the inside, hiding what is inside, he explains how this echoes his own experiences of shielding his own pain from both himself and others and the isolation he felt as he grieved for his son. The back yard provides ‘clues’ to the inhabitants’ life inside: piles of unopened post on the back step; filled rubbish bags leaking their contents; neglected cups of coffee; and woodwork jobs left incomplete: ‘What's He Building in There?’ is exactly that – it's inspired by this Tom Waites song – and explores all the intrigue of what goes on behind closed doors. I suppose it's the same with mental health. I’ve experienced that, being so locked in to your own thoughts and feelings, you can’t make sense of it yourself, let alone allow others in. What is this guy building in the secrecy of his own home? What is hiding in his home? What is he thinking in the depths of his mind? I really wanted to convey all of that mystery through all the tiny details of his back yard – all the clues that are there in where he lives. Like, who ever really knows what goes on behind closed doors, whether it's your home or in your head? Graham.
‘What's he's building in there’, made by Graham, Graham Boulton Miniatures © Author.
For Graham, while inspired by his own past experiences, the scenes he makes are not exactly replicas of real places but impressions of multiple spaces and times – compounded together. As such, another feature of the diorama that makers emphasise was the way in which they allow them to collapse, not only interiority and exteriority but space and time into one scene. In another of Graham's pieces, he explores the messy relations of society that configure around the home, or absence of home, in this case: ‘It's amazing isn’t is how we live in a society where some people don’t even have a home. I can’t get my head around that still. What has gone so wrong to lead to a situation where you can have so much wealth and plenty and so much poverty and desolation. What is the best symbol of that – a bank with a homeless person sleeping outside of it (Figure 5). Something we walk past every day, I wanted to make that piece as a sort of “fuck you to capitalism” and this messed up world we live in. It isn’t a particular place – it's just lots of places that could be anywhere and I change the scene around – create different scenarios in the box. Sometimes it's just the homeless man, sometimes his dog is there, sometimes other people, poking him with stick. Everyone is guilty in a way. Everything is political in the end’. Graham.
Diorama made by Graham, Graham Boulton miniatures © Graham Boulton Miniatures.
As a growing body of research attests, the construction of dioramas improves spatial thinking including knowledge of orientation in space, distance, associations, patterns, scale and changes over space which can enhance makers sense of place, identity and social connection (Gaber et al., 2025; Galinsky, 2023; Gray et al., 2019; Rule et al., 2015). As Chadarevian and Hopwood (2004) articulate, modelling in 3D enables exploration and display of relations, not possible in other dimensions, due the demands this form of knowledge production makes in terms of bodily engagement, deep knowledge and synthesis. It is precisely such relations that Graham explores in the making of his room boxes. As well as condensing space, conjoining temporal clauses or capturing the ‘chronological dimensions’ of experience (Ricoeur, 2016) are also key features of practitioner's narrativisation of scenes. Like other miniatures, scaling down allows for a transcendence of temporal boundaries (Stewart, 1993) as these scenes capture ‘both a moment in time and the flux of all time’ (Sadler, 2022: 4). Abi, for example discusses how the slow passing of time is a key theme in much of her work. ‘
‘Overdue’, made by Abi, Tobacco & Regrets. © Abi Trotman, Tobacco & Regrets.
For Abi then, depicting the passage of time is key to her pieces appearing ‘real’, as discussed in more detail below. Time also figures in Isla's pieces, as although she likes to imagine the fictitious inhabitants of her dioramas for inspiration, she admits everything she makes is also, ‘personal in some way or another, and relates to a past memory or experience – a fleeting moment in time I want to recreate the feeling of’. This sense of trying to capture transience is reflected in the nostalgia that she says characterises her scenes. Reflecting on one diorama of a cinema she built into the void of a vintage camera (Figure 7), she articulates: ‘When I opened up that Super 8 Cine camera, I just felt cosy, and it took me straight back in time to when I was growing up. There was a local cinema that was in an old, converted music hall. I loved going there as a child. It was my escape from what was going on at home. Home wasn't always a happy place and could be quite disruptive at times. I really wanted to recreate that feeling of warmth and security; the feel of the material on the seat, the smell of the popcorn, the ticket in your hand. In miniature, it's all about retaining the vital parts of something. I have to decide what is really really important to make a place feel right, even if that means certain details fall off or I have play with different scales. That's the challenge of miniature that makes it so appealing. I want to create that charm that comes from the rose-tinted nostalgia of looking-backwards’. Isla.
‘The old cinema’, made by Isla, the Borrowed Isle © The Borrowed Isle.
For Isla, looking back in time is therefore a simultaneous process of moving forward, and as articulated above, her dynamic route to repair. For all, paying such attention to the complex but ambiguous relations that make up life is a fundamental feature of constructing miniature dioramas. As I go on to highlight in the next section, key to capturing the ‘reality’ of ‘life’, is the scaling-down process, as it is only through this ‘shrinking’ that makers feel they can adequately capture the ‘largeness’ of life at home.
Shrinking the macro into the micro
Abi, Isa and Graham all emphasise how their fascination with the ‘real world’ drives their practice, and in particular, their desire to imbue pieces with a sense of ‘realism’ or ‘life’. Crucially, and perhaps counterintuitively, all of them emphasised how this is best achieved by shrinking their dioramas of the home down, precisely because this enables them to both capture ‘'Shrinking allows you to really pack in and emphasise the details and highlight what is important at the same time to make things looks as realistic as possible. You have to understand how something is put together which can be really complicated in the case of a piece of furniture say, but then only retain the vital parts that makes something what it is – the feel of the fabric on the seat for example, and the way the colour makes you feel – as well as the way it is built. Then it's alright for other certain details to fall off. So, I study things in detail to decide what is really, really important for me to make something feel right and then that also dictates the scale. It gets harder to make things the smaller you get, so there is challenge in making something as small as possible, but it also has to be large enough to have just the right level of detail to be able to tell the story you want. I know that that's not traditional, to play with different scales but my spaces are dictated by the objects and the feeling that I am trying to create. I think at some point you have to go with how you want it to feel. When I’m scaling chair for example, I can't make all joints because they wouldn’t even be visible to the naked eye, but the brain expects to see lots of joints holding a chair together and if they aren’t there at all, it would look odd. So, I decide which are the most essential and then I put a couple of joints even if they are bigger – maybe 1/50th scale – because then your brain can kind of work it out and make it look right even if bits are missing or they are not at the right scale. The more “correct” [indicates inverted commas] things are, the less impact I think they make. You might think that's really impressive how someone has made that with so much precision … but they don’t have the same … feeling, the same charm. That's why miniatures are so good for forcing you to decide on what details you care about – it's like shining a light on what's really really necessary’. Isa.
In a similar vein, Abi too emphasises the importance of scale, detail and feeling in her practice, articulating, like Isa, that achieving a sense of ‘realism’ through crafting these features into pieces is most important to her. Specifically, she describes how getting ‘life’ into her pieces is best achieved by capturing the multisensorial features of things as well as working with what different materials afford her. As Wolf (2012) describes, many details employed in fantasy world building do not advance the story but ‘provide background richness and verisimilitude to the imaginative world’ (Wolf, 2012: 2) under construction. As Abi articulates, it is this rich layering detail that helps her depict the complexity of life and tell her narratives as faithfully as possible: ‘It's what has taken me the longest time to learn – how to do realism – and that's become most important. There's a lot of trial and error. But, it's also about getting the right kind of feel and that aesthetic of something that has been lived in, that's what you want to get right, rather than like it being a “perfect” [indicated inverted commas] or pristine replica of something. I think that's where the recycled element comes in. Like, I have bags and bags of old watch parts which I use to make my typewriters. They have a sense of use and wear in them that is so hard is difficult to replicate. I use a hell of a lot of recycled cardboard. Why would I want to buy new materials when I can raid my recycling bin for old carboard that's been out in the rain and aged and weathered so beautifully? It has all the realness of life in it already … I love making tiny little distressed cardboard boxes, all crumpled and full of dust, because I think they give this true image of life. The key for me is making things that have a sense of life in them – that look touched, used, interacted with. 40% of that comes from reference, 60% from my imagination. If I’m making a chair, I imagine, how would it be moulded as if it had just had someone sat in it, or if someone had smoked 60 cigarettes a day in it, what effect would that have on the fabric? It's like playing with senses. I want the person to look at it and almost be able to smell that nicotine. I’m still trying to perfect this – how to get realism and distress in, but in a subtle way, not to overdo it. I’ve experimented with alcohols to get that effect but my favourite thing right now is super glue. I’ve been using that for ages and working out how to use that as a modelling medium. I found it changes the composition of things and what you can then do with them in a way that I haven't seen before. I’ve tried different scales too and settled on 1:12th because it has the right level of detail to tell a story – it's not too big or too small. I keep going back and forth, trying new things, adding and taking away, building in the layers of complexity, to get all the richness of the story in’. Abi.
Graham too highlights the importance of ‘building detail’ that is enabled by working in small-scale, as well as the ‘mesmerising’ effect this has, as he is engaged in the process of making, fuelling his sense of curiosity about the world around him, making him ‘When you are building in detail it makes you look at the world in detail. Most people don’t ever look at the clouds – they never pay attention to all those amazing patterns that naturally exist around us that we can hardly even fathom. You just get lost in all the mesmerising patterns and it's just easier to capture that in small-scale somehow. It's attention to that kind of complexity that makes you feel differently. I guess it opens up your curiosity about the world and makes you be in the world differently’. Graham
As well as curiosity, makers also described how creating miniatures elicits other emotions such as surprise and shock – emotions they both want to and do provoke in audiences but also ‘There is so much craftsmanship in making something in a different scale too. You have to work things out and there will be surprises along the way – that's what makes it feel exciting. Other people feel that too when they look at your miniatures. They walk up to your piece and at first they just see an old camera. They aren’t expecting more. I see that slightly confused look on someone's face when they walk closer and say, “What the fuck?”, then they go, “Ahhhhhhh wow, that's amazing”. And that's the moment. I think that maybe the scale has something to do with it. Miniatures are cute and engaging and they draw people into that world of imagination. But, I think that the best things are the things that also surprise you slightly and force you to go on a journey through them. There is just something about miniatures. They just really strike inside; they go really deep into people and they mean something. I wonder if miniatures just sort of condense big feelings into something achievable that you can access in your own life. It's like magic’. Isla
This idea of being drawn into the miniature scenes in the process of making was echoed by Graham who finds their ‘pull’ equally ‘therapeutic’, precisely because of their ability to surprise with their tantalising promise of possibility: ‘Making miniatures is a therapy. That feeling of surprise, I suppose, you feel a pull into another world – at the same time as feel a pull out of yours. Life is bleak in many many ways. It can be tempting to sink so low – I know, I’ve been there, so many times. But, all you need is something small, something that lifts you, that makes you question what you think you know, that makes you feel differently – a tiny moment that stops you sinking and makes you realise that there are other possibilities out there – as humans we need that – we need that survive. What are we if we don’t have that?’ Graham
Discussion
Abi, Isla and Graham are not the only participants that describe the transformative effects making miniatures has on their lives. Most of the 40 or so miniaturists I engaged with were ebullient about the exhilaration, joy and sheer delight that they experience in making, describing it as an addiction, obsession and a high that they cannot live without. Some, like Jan, who has been making miniature flowers for over 60 years attribute their longevity and well-being to the craft with Jan remarking, ‘I could never be bored with so much to wonder at. It must be why I still feel so alive!’. Others, like Pauline who started making dollhouses after suffering a serious brain injury, feels the effect it has on improving cognitive function and fine motor skills, ensuring not only her rehabilitation but also her ‘survival’ as she puts it. And more still, like Elliott, describe how miniature-making benefits their mental health, lifting them in moments of grief, depression or sadness, ‘saving [them] in the most dark and depressive moments’ by allowing them to experience the ‘beauty of life’. As such, when I argue that crafting miniatures makes practitioners come
However, in this article, I have highlighted how the miniature diorama, in particular, affords such liveliness. It is precisely because this genre allows makers to connect with and showcase life in its fullest sense, that I believe it has such transformative effects. Makers emphasise how, with dioramas, they are able to narrativise life; give meaning to significant ‘scenes’ that play out in the most personal of places – the home. It is in these domestic scenes that material space and interior feelings coalesce in space and time to unfold life in ways that makers regard as fundamental. It is not just observing such complex but ambiguous relationships that take place in the crafting of miniature homes, but I argue, a sort of coming
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all of the participants included in this study who gave me their time, insights and hospitality.
Ethical approval and informed consent statements
The data presented in this article was collected as part of a research project entitled
Consent to participate
Informed consent for publication has been obtained from all participants included in this study including for use of all photographs included in this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability
The author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials.