Art in Boxes

Confinement: The time preceding the birth of a child.

No one wants to be put in a box. Boxes are confining. They hold you to a particular shape, prevent you from exploring, keep things out of your reach. We don't like boundaries in our culture, not at all.

But artists need boundaries to do their best work. When I collect small objects and arrange them together in a box, their proximity to each other changes the meaning of each individual piece. Together they tell stories or ask questions with more thickness and depth than what each is able to convey on its own. The cut paper interiors I've been working on this month benefit from being confined to a space that's only big enough to reveal small parts of a room; it forces a particular lens and calls attention to details the viewer might otherwise miss.

Poetry works the same way. Compressed language presents us with startling layers of images, emotions, and ideas. Drawings and paintings have edges. Music has structure and form. Stories have a beginning and an end. Confinement. Proximity. Boundaries. By preventing an overwhelming amount of input, these limits create intimacy and make room for the work to stretch and grow more fully into itself.

There are times in both art and life, when allowing yourself to be contained, to be held within limits, brings about a more satisfying end. Compression increases density. Choosing one thing over another eliminates possibilities certainly, but it also allows for greater concentration on what you've chosen to keep. It's no coincidence that the definition for the word confinement is both “restraining a person's liberty” and “the process of giving birth”. Creation and restraint are complementary actions.

It's easy to accept imitation, repetition, and quick fixes in our amped up, frenetic world, but the hard work of creating, tending, and restoring real beauty, real relationships, real places of lively conversation and shared work is worth the price of restraint.