Artist Makes Magic With Bottle Dolls

By The Oakland Post

Simply said, Goddess­Mother SupaQueen (yes, that’s her name) makes dolls.

She got started in 2012 while living in New Orleans and drew inspiration looking at bottles in her home: wine bottles, liquor bottles, even olive oil bottles.

A writer (of horror) the Oakland mother of three draws on a lively imagination and spiritual insight to create the dolls who ‘speak’ to her as she gathers the elements to complete them.

Besides the bottle itself, she relies on found objects and materials: fabric leftover from a dress made for her, sticks, tree bark she sees on walks in the city or along a beach; corn husks; even the paint she prefers comes from a store on Telegraph avenue that sells odds and ends of paint.

For the eyes of the dolls she’ll use cowrie shells, beans or pennies, having re­called the expression about an untrustworthy person who would ‘steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes.”

Calling her business ‘Wa­ter Witch Creations Ancestor Bottles and More’, Goddess­Mother’s advice to future art­ists is ‘never half step.”

She takes her own advice in that regard as a doll may take up to two weeks to com­plete.

Response to her work is interesting, she said. The first doll she sold evoked the im­age of Yemoja, the Yoruba goddess of the ocean and the buyer said that it changed the energy in her house, giving it a feeling of peace.

She replenishes her cre­ative urge by re-reading a card written to her by a friend in the 1990s encouraging her “to take your gifts and fly.”

Water Witch Creations is proof of her flight.

This article originally appeared in the Oakland Post.