Stephanie Todhunter started working on the Latchkey Kids Project in 2014. The backbone of the series is an ongoing succession of plaster encased vintage dolls, each re-colored and re-named. The plaster encased girls (reminiscent of Han Solo encased in carbonite) begin as vintage Dawn dolls from the 1970s. These dolls were only made for a brief amount of time and generally only remembered by the GenX generation. Dawn dolls are smaller than Barbies and, although they have exaggerated waspish waists and perky breasts, are “tweenish” in age. They were small, generic, easy to carry and easy to lose. Once the dolls have been plastered and inked, they develop distinct and often unsettling features and personalities. Stephanie takes a photographic portrait of each girl to capture and highlight these quirks. These portraits are used in larger pieces to tell stories about the lost girls. Common themes are isolation, stranger danger, missing children, parental neglect, and lord-of-the-flies-like adventure in small town suburbia. In her most recent work, the “Saints of the Drowned World” rule over remains of bygone Apocalypses: Nuclear Winter, Cold War, Satanic Panic, Stranger Danger. They also rule over private childhood catastrophies: divorce, abuse, neglect and abandonment. The Saints are reminders that there have always been global catastrophies in the making as well as gentle guardians of our own very private and personal apocalypses. And a final reminder that catastrophic extinction events have always resulted in bursts of evolutionary change.