House Boxes – ‘Portraits Of The Mind’
When I was a child, businesses and corporations began buying up rows and rows of terrace houses where I lived to build factories and storage facilities on the land on which they stood. In haste, previous tenants quickly sold up and moved on often leaving behind possessions and treasures waiting to be explored.
As a child fascinated by what I could discover, I would enter these empty homes, often without boarding or security allowing me unfettered access to absorb the potential troves within – they were moments vitrified in time; furniture, clothing and many other chattels and adornments just left abandoned. I found this exhilarating; like having a direct view into the thoughts and lives of former inhabitants via the objects they kept.
I felt as though I got to meet these previous tenants, without hellos or handshakes, a sort of transcendental encounter through the remnants left behind in the wake of their quick departure from their previous lives. As such, my Box Sculptures have much of their roots in this early experience and form the basis of my past and future projects.
An Exploration and Curation of a “Mind in a Box”
I have been making box constructions using carpentry skills, frequently utilising recycled wood and allowing this box construction to become a vehicle to carry a myriad of other paraphernalia and other flotsam and jetsam. I give these objects an autobiographical interpretation and compose them into Lilliputian Rooms which I refer to as ‘Portraits of The Mind’ or ‘House Boxes’.
The meaning behind this work is that, just as we can paint a portrait of a person with paints and brushes on canvas or paper, so too can I produce my interpretation or “portrait of a person’s mind” by interviewing them and discovering who they are and what they might feel through the artistic use of objects and unremarkable treasures.
Represented via a miniature room, these objects are showcased inside where the spectator can “read” the 3D narrative by looking inside the box. The work is often constructed into boxes starting from about 13 inches to 5.5 feet high. My later training as an actress has helped make these box structures into miniature stages too.
Frequently the boxes about my and other people’s mental portraits are related to experiences that I pick up from myself, or the mind of the person I am doing the portrait of, and I infuse them with what I consider to be suitable colours to capture the emotion of the memories, feelings etc and incorporate a playful aura to them so as not to simply focus on any negative themes present. In a way, I think people have their own collection of inanimate objects that speak up for who they are, and it is my job to represent them via these objects. Additionally, I very much like to capture comedy in the work as I love to see the comedy in life as so often tragedy gone full circle often metamorphoses into comedy mainly because of the disbelief in accepting that so much pain has been repeatedly experienced in the World.
I would like to develop my ideas on how to capture funny moments in 3D paraphernalia in these box sculptures. This has echoes of when I used to play comical characters when I was acting.
These box sculptures are intended to capture drama, or a moment vitrified in a drama. The stillness in a box sculpture can capture a memory sans movement in the work. As in a painting and other art forms, capturing for example times long past in the very configuration of the selected objects that narrate the 3D tale from any period chosen.
The work is very existential in the way it relies on what I find in skips, and what people donate to me from their discarded objects and in this way the work becomes many people’s 3D dossiers. I then place the objects in transparent bags and label them; not de similar to the way an archaeologist archives their discoveries.
Additionally, the work relies heavily on the constantly changing times we live, for example, many libraries are constantly closing and being sold off by local councils to help deal with their fiscal deficits, and many of the library books are too old to use because they are falling apart, have missing pages and too expensive to restore. Further, many people now go to coffee shops to use their technology and are using libraries less and less. When they do go to libraries, they can get all the information they need from the internet on their devices and do not borrow books very often from the library.
This is where I step in again, as I collect the books like rag and bone men use to collect ‘any old iron’ and I re-purpose the books (in my latest box sculptures I use many book folding techniques to make bespoke objects to go in my work). I also make Book Folded structures as free-standing sculptures.
The boxes extend outside of themselves creating and demanding a space they occupy in their demarcation; this demarcation is alternating because the work invites the spectator to approach the boxes and peer inside, but, the work also requests that the spectator takes varied viewpoints at a distance as the work reveals different aspects of itself depending on where the viewer is located, and therefore, there is no delimiting way to take in the work. Some box works have exteriorized features that are excrescent. I, thus, encourage the spectator to mentally and physically enter when looking inside and outside the box becoming, if they wish, physically entwined in the materialism of the box, for example, a spectator can lie on their back on the floor to view the interior ceiling of the box room and thus take in more information.
The works are also time capsules as they frequently incorporate objects from the current times we live, as well as relicts from the past.
Symbols, signals, and images are all around us, they mark the way forward in life, when they are abbreviated like U.N, UNESCO etc they may be meaningless apart from the meaning we place on them, and they become recognisable.
I have thousands of objects that I provide meanings and from my life’s experiences, but the same object can have several interpretations in my work depending on where I am psychologically in my life. Some interpretations of objects are a folding umbrella can be opened without its canvas and if you add some miniature seats at the end of each spike it can become a fairground ride that resembles a gimmicky spider. The broken and discarded folding umbrella (that I frequently find abandoned in the streets after stormy weather) can also become a crinoline Victorian dress with the umbrella canvas remaining on it as the dress fabric on a doll like a dress on a cat-walk show, mad like a performance art piece. One of the reasons I see things differently is because of my confusing and misleading upbringing where I was experiencing profound difficulties, but my parents would teach me that bad things I experienced were good and good things were bad, so I was informed anyway. This was down to their psychological issues that I discovered much more about when I became an adult. So, I always saw other information in what was happening around me and this made me (I believe) interpret paraphernalia in a different way than other people would do.
Another example of viewing the world in a topsy turvy way is when as a child, I witnessed the weather: if it snowed it was God’s dandruff as he shook his colossal head in the heavens and his dandruff fell to earth and if it rained it was because God was sad, and the raindrops were his tears. When I saw a scarecrow, or I thought of one, I imagined it being Jesus Christ on the cross. This was a strong image for me as I sought answers from the evangelical church that was extremely influential in 1970s Tottenham where I grew up.
In the drawing books I have made, based on ancient Greek books, I have included these image interpretations and often I see these books as image dictionaries where I keep the explanations of what objects and images mean to me autobiographically. I have produced about 35 of these books of recordings of object interpretations.
Frequently when I design a box sculpture, I use an acting exercise to aid the creation it is called the 4 W’s:
Where are you?
What are you doing?
Why are you doing it?
Who are you?
When is it?
This is to help me create my or the person’s surroundings that may live in one of my diminutive box room interiors (a cupboard of their mind on display dictated by their environs in their home). Therefore, the boxes are ‘Portraits of The Mind’ as the energy of the person who may use the lilliputian interior is channelled by the inanimate objects that they keep around them and is also imbued in the very fabric of the walls of the flyspeck room. Their presence is felt through the residual energy they created when they inhabited the space although I usually do not have people in the spaces, as the work is also about the loneliness of the void.
Possibly, bantam room interiors like these boxes are a way of having some control over my World as I always felt I was permitted no agency to do what I needed when I was growing up and beyond. I felt sequestered and therefore just lived in my head, again the reasons for creating the ongoing series of ‘The Portraits of The Mind’.
The boondocks of Tottenham just added to the inability to escape anywhere. My head was permanently cluttered as responsibilities of being a carer mounted in my young head. I used to believe that I was expected to bi- locate as I had to be doing everything everywhere simultaneously. This has become a lifelong struggle now as I have internalised this way of thinking and always overload myself which is very apparent and made manifest in the cluttered room interiors of my box sculptures.
Living with the superstitious and religious beliefs of a Greek family made me find unsuitable and erroneous explanations to what was unraveling as life itself before me, I therefore as a child began to believe in eldritch activity and god’s will as the only explanations offered about what was occurring.
I plan to continue developing the execution of portraits of other people’s minds too like a portrait painter captures the physiognomy of a person I would like to capture the portrait of the mind by interviewing people and recording their stories through a particular shaped box, that I feel suits their bespoke story and personality, and that will act as the vehicle for the objects within it that narrate their 3D tale. The result of a box portrait will be different each time the same person sits for me, that is: where are they at this stage of their life? How much older are they now? And what current flotsam and jetsam are discarded in the World at the time of executing the box portrait? For example, some of the biggest waste products today are all things plastic and obsolete technology and as I have said the boxes are like time capsules as they incorporate these present trends.
I have the ambition to be an “Artist in Residence” at a facility that cares for primates so I can study them to see what Box sculpture Portrait of The Mind I come up with especially as they are our silent closest relatives and as we think in images, I am very enthralled to see what I glean from their mentality.
The boxes also capture the passage of time as a time sequence, for example, I am currently working on a piece which is based on some church ruins; the church has no roof and snow is falling. The leaves have fallen from the trees after the snow has stopped to inform you of this fact, whereas, if the leaves had snow on them, you would know they were on the ground during the snowfall. The same applies to footprints and other ephemeral and non-ephemeral references. This has the feel of an investigative procedure to it. This in a way works out time lapsing.
Peering inside a box piece is like staring into someone else’s memory bank, like the writer Dennis Potter’s ‘Cold Lazarus’.
My work may appear claustrophobic as the box pieces are so impregnated by vast amounts of objects and while this is intentional, I still want the work to breathe and not have a feeling of being immured, but for the spectator’s eyes to have somewhere to rest on a negative space because the juxtaposition of matter and void creates a contrast where one emphasises the other’s importance – after all, we learn so much if we have contrast about ourselves.
The work is labyrinthine because that is my view of life so in this respect my experiences of life would fuse with a sitter that would like a portrait box piece done of their mind.
I designed these pieces that have their own independent lighting to be displayed in two different lighting conditions.
As I have mentioned I would like to show them in an exhibition in the normal daytime gallery lighting with their electric lighting on and be viewed on the one hand in this way and in the evening shut out the daylight (if its day time) and let the work speak in shadows and silhouettes. Another 3D narrative is told via the changing of the lighting of the same pieces. Here are some examples of what the work looks like in the dark with the piece’s own electric lights switched on.
Displaying Box Sculptures in Two Different Lighting Conditions:
Chiaroscuro; is the technique of using light and shade in pictorial representation. As mentioned, I would like to display work in two different lighting conditions this tells a story from the light and dark created via high lights these lighting methods create. There is a feeling of mysteriousness and numen activity when the boxes are displayed in a dark or dimly lit room while the incandescent lighting of the box illuminates. It is also a very theatrical experience and narrates the two sides of a character’s mind: The light and dark side.
The other way of exaggerating the light in the box that emphasises the three-dimensionality of the box’s interior and makes manifest latent contents by light accentuation is to have mirror balls or cut-glass balls that are multi-faceted as chandeliers in these miniature rooms. The effect this has is that it captures a 360-degree view of the interior of the box as well as the space it occupies; through the apertures on the box’s exterior, e.g. the gallery space it is exhibited in, and it gathers this surrounding light and reflection and sends it inside the box. If a mirror floor is added in the box/es it doubles up the light from the electrical lighting as would a convex mirror you get on bicycles; this is reminiscent of Philip Guston’s 1913- 1980 painting ‘Bombardment’ 1937-38, as it looks like a painting made from an image reflected from a convex mirror reflection. Equally, Anish Kapoor’s ‘Disc Mirror’ sculpture also has a concave mirror disc that reduces the image of its environs and sends it inside its concave surface. The multi-faceted mirror ball and cut-glass crystal ball, especially if it is a magnifying mirror, and if the cut glass multi-faceted chandelier ball is real cut glass &/or iridescent quartz and not moulded, can capture a myriad of colours and send these rainbow effects into the piece too.
On my recent trip to Bristol, off Anchor Road BS1 there is an architectural structure that is a giant mirror ball as an entrance to its edifice. This spherical shape captures a 360-degree view of the city’s environs. This is reminiscent of my taking panoramic photographs of my box sculpture room interiors or real room interiors and projecting these images into a plain wooden box. This signifies a ghostly presence that remains from past times, the light from the projector adds another dimension that the story light tells.
Additionally, regarding illumination through lighting: the apertures cut into the box construction both illuminate by allowing light into the boxes but also literally and metaphorically speaking they allow visual ventilation.