On a trip to Japan in 2009, Laurie Simmons gravitated to a hyperrealistic sex doll, and in it, found a subject for a new body of work: The Love Doll. Although the artist already established herself in the art world, Simmons was known for her work with smaller representations of the human form: miniatures, dolls, and ventriloquist figures, which addressed the representation of women and domestic spaces. The love doll was the artist's foray into the world of the lifesize, where the real world, rather than the constructed one, offered offered her ample room for photographic play and performance. The Love Doll series chronicles Laurie Simmons' evolving relationship with the figure itself and her learning how to photograph it. In Simmons' continued search for surrogates, the Love Doll introduced Simmons to working with human scale.