Iskander, Dalia;
(2025)
‘Coming to life’ through crafting miniature dioramas of home.
Journal of Material Culture
10.1177/13591835251409699.
(In press).
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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 to life. to life.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | ‘Coming to life’ through crafting miniature dioramas of home |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/13591835251409699 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835251409699 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s), 2025. This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | miniature, dollshouses, diorama, home, craft, life, health, well-being |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10219508 |
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