Zarah is a hauntingly beautiful original work of doll art by Monika Mechling. This one of a kind lady doll is sculpted, hand painted, wigged, costumed, signed and dated exclusively by Monika herself, for her Illinois doll company which goes simply by her first name, Monika. Zarah is made of porcelain, with soft body, and sits as shown on a hand crafted pedestal 25 inches tall. Her wig is mohair. Zarah, as is a hallmark of Monika's dolls in general, has been inspired by the Art Nouveau period. Zarah's face, pose and costume coalesce to tell a woman's story in this evocative piece.

Monika dolls are among the most exquisitely feminine in doll art, able to convey through the feminine form a deeply interior dimension of women. In the artist's own words, the women she creates in her doll art "stand as icons -- social, sexual and religious." Monika's aspiration was for her dolls somehow "to translate the burdens, the pleasures and the pains of being a woman". Her hope was that the movement she achieved in her classically female forms would express the complexity and tensions inherent in femininity, or as she herself aptly put it, "the juxtaposition of beauty and ideals intertwined with questioning restraints."