my box

The reason why I have chosen to create a box is because I
wanted an item of some sort which could represent my idea clearly but allow
leeway for my audience to gain their own perspective on my work. I wanted to have an object which had two
sides to it like a door which could almost hide or reveal something. This effect proved well in my experiments
with the medicine the medicine tubs and the match stick box. They where all boxes and held something
unrevealed. In this case I wanted the
box to represent a person. It could have been any individual but I wanted it to
represent my mum. On the outside of the
box I wanted it to look old and decaying like an ordinary box which people
wouldn’t look twice at. This is because
with every individual lies a road of experiences which they have faced and
every individual is different.
Unfortunately we can’t tell this by judging what the cover looks like on
the outside. We have to be told about
the experiences they have had, we couldn’t know anything in depth when just
looking at them. So everyone looks
normal with in a sense but has stories which differ which have to be told to
us, we couldn’t tell this by just looking at them. This is what I want to achieve with the
box. On the outside it looks like a
normal box but when you open the box it tells a totally different story.

With the box now
representing a person and the outside representing the appearance of a person
im now going to move on to the inside of the box. Everyone has a fear of some sort which was
proven in my results from my questionnaire.
This also varies from person to person but when looking at my mums fear,
hers is about dying. With her past
experiences she has had with hospitals which i explained earlier she has a phobia
of hospitals and from her near experiences with death she is scared of
dying. When looking at my mum i wouldn’t
be able to tell this by looking at her.
This is what I wanted to achieve with the box so that my audience would
be clueless when looking at the box its not until they look inside why they
gain a better insight. It’s almost like
the box is telling a story.

The story of my mum and her near death experiences she had
and ultimately her fear of dying. With
my experiments earlier in the brief I experimented with various materials one
of them being a tree trunk. This was
also to represent my mums fear. In my
final I choose to make the box out of wood because the material has important
representations to go along side it. With the wood being a living material and
the box representing my mum it symbolised natural life and living things. With the wood, it’s gradually dying which
will unfortunately happen to us all.
This is why I choose this material so it interlinked with the item I
choose to have in the box. I decided to
have a burnt log of wood which is charred black which means the wood is pretty
much dead. With the wood being black
obviously black has connotations of death which I think works well. Again this represents my mum’s fear of
death. During the interview with my mum
she described that certain smells reminded her of the experience she had in the
hospital. I covered the bottom of the box with pine tree leaves and small
sticks so it looks like the floor of the forest. It also gives of the smell of nature like
being in the forest quite a clean and pleasant smell which my audience will
experience. I wanted this to happen so it’s
like a fragment of what my mum has experienced and that it’s the same theme as
what’s in the movie. I didn’t want to
make this piece ultra obvious hence why I have chosen the route I have so that
the audience can take away there own perspective of my art.

When creating my final I could have taken other routes which
I have tried through out this project such as making something from the
inspiration of the human anatomy. I
experimented with clay and the facial expressions. I thought it worked well but wasn’t what I
wanted to achieve. I wanted something
that was less obvious and could be read into more detail. The human form has limitations to where the
mind could go and what my audience could associate with it. This is why I choose the box because the
limitations are endless. I was also
contemplating the fact of creating a large piece in the form of a gallbladder
but I decided against this as I didn’t think it would work as well and again it
was too obvious. As you can tell I have
been inspired greatly from my artist. My
favourites through this project and that have influenced me the most would be
mike nelson and Nathan Coley.