Founder of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard, Frances Glessner Lee was born to an affluent Chicago family in 1878, where she learned the treasured and worthy skills of homemaking from her aunts and mother: metalworking, crocheting, painting, embroidery, and knitting. Lee, however, was anxious to attend school for medicine, but was barred from doing so because "a lady didn't go to school."

By her mid-60s, Lee's love for craftsmanship and her desire to do something worthwhile for her community led to her first "Nutshell study," 18 of which are photographed and featured in Corinne May Botz's The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Based on actual police reports of unsolved deaths, the Nutshells are ornate, "dollhouse sized (1 inch: 1 foot)," macabre reconstructions of crime scenes, with dolls made up to resemble corpses. Although based on real cases, with the intention of "convicting the guilty, clearing the innocent, and finding the truth in a nutshell," the constructions have characteristics that speak of the creator herself. Lee believed they should be as acutely detailed as possible, to replicate death in miniature.

Meticulously created objects — stockings knitted with needles the size of straight pins, a tiny New Yorker, and a miniature corkscrew flung among tiny bottles — made the Nutshell worthy of attention from academics and police officers alike. The men in blue who attended her workshops at Harvard deemed Lee "the patron saint of policemen and policewomen," and she was eventually made an honorary Captain of the New Hampshire police force.

Family, aging, youth, loneliness, and sexuality are innate, frozen themes in the miniatures. The cases depicted in Botz's photography and floor-plan diagrams are both gripping and disconcerting — artistically, they have the same emotional effect as Hans Bellmer or Chapman Brothers dolls, with the attention to craft of Tracey Emin and Judy Chicago. Lee's dollhouses, however, are harrowing — not only because of their stereotypically innocent medium and construction, but because of their subsequent stillness.

-Karen Ingram