Ed Franklin’s community dolls
By Paul Brown
The dolls are coming back to North Limestone, and this time, they are much sneakier. Artist and neighborhood resident Ed Franklin has embarked on his third year of making a doll per day for the month of November, and hiding them for others to find.
Franklin began making dolls for the community two years ago. He wanted to draw people into the parts of Lexington he has come to love since moving here in 1995. Made of found wood, hand cut and then painted into a variety of forms and figures, the dolls draw influence from German toys and Japanese Kakeshi dolls, as evidenced by their wooden construction and simply painted detailing. In hiding the dolls and providing clues leading to their discovery, Franklin hoped to attract people to less traveled parts of the city. It was a way to get searching parties to spend greater amounts of time in–and in different parts of–places they knew well, like Sqecial Media (where Franklin works) and the University of Kentucky’s campus. The hide and seek nature of the “game,” as he refers to it, called out to the inner child in all of us to be as curious as we were once upon a time.
At the beginning, says Franklin, people hesitated to take the dolls from their hiding place, perhaps because they seemed so precious—an unexpected piece of art taken out of their normal context. “People tended to be respectful, and leave them where they were,” the artist observed. Things got so bad, Franklin had to attach notes letting people know that it was okay to take the found dolls.
This time around, the dolls will be made by both Franklin and his friends and neighbors. In the past, clues to the location were delivered in the form of text, pictures, or both. One clue from a past doll a day event, for example, read “a big doll with a little clue, an N and a D plus 672.” the clue referred doll-hunters to the Library call number, beside which Franklin had hid the doll in the Lucille Little Arts Library.
But this year Franklin wants to encourage deeper exploration of and appreciation for downtown Lexington. The clues are less clear and require deeper searching in large areas. For example, early this month he posted the clue ‘parking structure.’ Several days after hiding it, the ambiguous clue led the eventual owner of the doll to the Public Library parking garage. So be on the lookout for some new wooden additions to the downtown sector. Look for the clues to find the dolls that will be hiding in plain sight. And by all means feel free to grab them and take them home with you.
More importantly, though, follow Franklin’s lead and get out and explore the cool things this city has to offer. Happy Hunting.
Head to Ed’s facebook page for doll clues.
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