Don't call them dolls

Bird cages, a fish skeleton, potatoes sprouting roots and the head of a deer are just part of the intriguing collection of dolls created by Tamar Mogendorff. Yes, they are dolls, but their color palette and the variety of fabrics from which they are made indicate their target audience is not, in fact, children. Mogendorff, too, feels uncomfortable calling the objects she makes by the name of a child's toy.

"True, I call them dolls but recently I've been running away from that definition a bit, because they aren't so much dolls, though not a sculpture, but rather a decorative object. In any case, I try not to occupy myself with definitions. It's terribly tiring for me, and it also doesn't seem relevant to me in most cases. What difference does it even make? My things are entirely decoration. My best-selling items for a long time now have been the deer's head and the bear and the bird cage."

The price, too, indicates these aren't standard children's dolls. The average price for a doll is $100 and can reach several thousand dollars for special orders.

Her art can be found in prestigious boutiques around the world - the United States, England, Japan, Australia, Spain, Belgium, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia and elsewhere and so can the results of Mogendorff's cooperation with textile designers and fashion designers like Paul Smith on such projects as display windows, showrooms and more.

Mogendorff, 34, grew up on Kibbutz Hazorea and graduated from the visual communications department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, in 2002.

After completing her studies, she was not sure what she wanted to do and decided to return to New York, where she had been an exchange student while at Bezalel.

"I wanted to disappear a bit, to put my ambition aside and look around some at what was happening, to live, to see where life was taking me," she says.

In New York, her hobby of sewing became a profession.

"It isn't anything I'd planned. Sewing is the easiest. You have a needle and thread at home and you sew. It's something that came to me easily - I never thought about why I am doing this. It just came to me. When I was little, I would make presents for people. It's something I got from home. My mother sewed. My grandmother sewed."

She laughs and says she probably sounds like a kibbutznik from the periphery.

"But this is something that apparently was imprinted in me, always. Even when I was studying at Bezalel, I did things with my hands. In New York, the need to make things suddenly came back to me, and that's also the reason I didn't keep working in graphic design. I need to make things, I need to feel my hands."

Asked how she chooses her fabrics, she replies: "When I started, it was just a hobby. I wouldn't go out specially to shop for fabrics but I'd use what I'd find at some flea market, some old cloth. I'd take a sleeve and make a doll from it. Nowadays it's different, more professional. I work with many kinds of fabrics, which change from season to season and from year to year. This year, for example, there is a lot of linen.

"The fabrics with texts are fabrics that come that way, and I dye them. Generally, I dye nearly all the fabrics I use, in tea or some other liquid. I try to give them a feeling that they have been though something in their life. I also enjoy this - I have a small color laboratory."

Does the fact that you studied graphic design, and not fashion design, influence the end result?

"I'm sure this has an influence - I didn't just happen to spend four years at Bezalel. I'm a person who learns a lot through intuition and I've learned to use this, not to be afraid, not feel this isn't okay," she says.

"I think product designers deal with other things. I am not concerned with the question of whether it will stand up. I think I work like an illustrator. I'm an illustrator in three dimensions.

"I wasn't a great illustrator at Bezalel. But I really loved typography. A crucial part of my work is editing - what is essential and what is not, what contributes to the final result and what doesn't. My studies are definitely a part of my evolution. If anyone were to have asked me 10 years ago what I was going to do, I wouldn't have had any idea but somehow this suddenly seems to make sense."

What next?

"I don't know but it's getting more interesting from year to year. It's thrilling, it's nice, I have two hands that know how to work and I feel like working, like playing a bit. I always have masses of ideas. My brain is at work."