As we grapple with a rapidly shifting world, toys become both mirrors of our past selves and symbols of our struggle to preserve meaning. Below, Isabella Greenwood explores a series of shows in which teddy bears take centre stage.
Steeped in a pervasive longing for the past, toys have re-emerged as potent symbols in contemporary art, shaping intricate narratives about memory, identity, and the affective residues of childhood. The toy, has become a locus of this discourse—a cipher through which we navigate our complex, and often contradictory, emotional inheritances.
Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys, a group exhibition at Soup Gallery (7th November–14th December), brings together the works of Dean JF Hoy, DaddyBears, and Ted Le Swer to interrogate the afterlives of childhood relics, recontextualising toys as objects that resonate with the adult psyche. The show becomes a speculative site where toys are displaced from their domestic realm, within the context of the gallery, where they disrupt a sense of temporal coherence.
Dean JF Hoy’s installation features a weathered teddy bear bound to the chrome grill of a suspended car—here, the toy is not simply an object of nostalgia but an emblem of violence and dispossession, suspended in a liminal space between comfort and danger. The plush figure, twisted into a perverse form of ornamentation, gestures towards themes of sacrifice and fetishisation, forcing the viewer to reckon with the fragility of childhood memory when entangled with the cold, mechanised aesthetics of adulthood.
DaddyBears transforms a dollhouse into an immersive, swamp-like cavern, swathed in satin textiles. By reimagining the “toy” not as a static relic but as a mutable environment—a site of refuge, play, or even transgression—DaddyBears disrupts the boundary between interiority and exteriority, memory and fantasy. The use of textiles is politically charged, invoking the aesthetics of care and domestic labour while appropriating traditionally feminine crafts, positioning her dollhouse as a subversive architecture.
Ted Le Swer’s film series engages with the uncanny animation of inanimate objects, drawing both from the “cadavers” of fabricated props and the secret life of toys as imagined in Pixar’s Toy Story. The films present the toy as an object of perpetual movement, oscillating between the macabre and the whimsical. Toys, or discarded fabric, once lifeless commodities, are reanimated as spectral entities caught in a loop of endless play, gesturing towards a deeper existential unease that underscores the entire exhibition.
These works challenge the viewer’s relationship with the toy, no longer an innocent plaything but a charged site of affect and meaning: functioning as a talisman of both tenderness and terror in the fractured landscape of adult memory. The teddy bear, a staple of childhood comfort, is positioned within a semiotic system of comfort commodities: both a souvenir from childhood-nostalgia and a consumer product, it embodies a cultural need for comfort. Borrowing from Sara Ahmed, the teddy bear does not merely receive our emotions but actively shapes our affective responses, embodying attachment, and care. This resurgence reflects a broader trend in contemporary art, where nostalgia intertwines with critical introspection. The use of childhood artefacts probes deeper reflections on the politics of memory: namely, what we chose to remember, and what we choose to forget.
Recent exhibitions such as Somerset House’s CUTE (January–April 2024) highlight the phenomenon of the teddy-bear and “cute”-child-hood aesthetics across music, fashion, toys, video games, and social media. Louis Morlae’s Rose Easton: Aut-O-O-O Arcadia also at Somerset House, equally resurrects the teddy-bear within the contemporary adult-psyche. Presenting teddy bears with bionic eyes encased in glass, Morlae’s work suggests a disquiet that reframes the teddy bear within the context of the digital age. The teddy bear, a symbol of innocence, is here reinterpreted as a hybrid artefact. A bionic eye’d lamb, and a wire woven crab, show the teddy-bear entangled with themes of surveillance and technological evolution.
Katja Kemnitz’s Too Much Love Series (2024) and Mark Nixon’s Much Loved (2013) photo series similarly explore the melancholic resonance of the toy, depicting images of disintegrated teddy bears. Both Kemnitz and Nixon’s works operate as visual archives, cataloguing the wear of intimacy—the slow erosion that ‘love’ inscribes upon their objects over time. Their photographs preserve each toy as a site of emotional entropy, where affection manifests in frayed seams and faded textures. In documenting this gradual decay, they underscore the paradox of attachment: that to cherish is also to dismantle, revealing love as a process of both preservation and loss.
In Ahh… Youth (October 3rd–March 9th, 2025) at Tate Modern, Mike Kelley’s assemblages of discarded plush toys also seek to function as visceral artefacts of memory, excavating the fractured terrain of childhood experience. His choice of disfigured thrift-store plushies—objects simultaneously soft and unsettling—subvert the cosy nostalgia typically associated with childhood ephemera, transforming the gallery into a site of psychic unease. Kelley’s figures, with their sagging faces, evoke the haunting remnants of innocence contaminated by the harsh realities of adult life.
Kelley’s ritual of reanimation imbues the teddy bear with an uncanny quality, forcing viewers into dialogue with their own internal archives of half-forgotten attachments. This eerie revivification transforms the toy from a symbol of comfort into a haunted artefact, resonant with traces of suppressed memory. Maurizio Cattelan’s Daddy Daddy (2008), depicting Pinocchio face down in a reflective pool, similarly complicates our relationship with childhood relics. Cattelan’s Pinocchio, stripped of narrative comfort, becomes a melancholic effigy of innocence betrayed—a tragicomic recognition of the myths surrounding youth. This disjunction in Kelley’s and Cattelan’s works does not merely recall the past but stages it as an apparational performance, troubling our nostalgia and implicating us in the violence of the act of remembering. Both Kelley and Cattelan channel an eeriness into their reanimations of toys, exposing an undercurrent of unease beneath their once-innocuous forms.
Together, these works recontextualise the teddy bear as a complex symbol within the adult psyche—a transformed artefact reflecting anxieties around change, degradation, and the loss of innocence. No longer mere playthings, these toys act as totems for tracing early emotional landscapes, revealing how objects both inscribe and efface their own histories. By re-encountering these ‘misfit’ toys within contemporary art, we confront a mediated past, caught between intimacy and detachment, preservation and decay. This cultural re-engagement with the teddy bear, lies not only in nostalgia but in a negotiation with memory. The teddy bear emerges as a reflective mirage—an enduring projection of our fantasies, hopes, and fears, haunting us with the ephemeral traces of childhood.
Written by Isabella Greenwood
