the Life Box

The box: to be constructed from the above book. I decided to build a "box" from a book because the largest part of my life at this time is being a student.

and so with a lot of glue and a lot of time waiting for things to dry, the pages were all glued together and the center cut out

I contemplated just filling the box up with some things that reflect the "inner me" but instead decided to take it in a slightly different direction. I did some sketches and came up with some visual metaphors to represent the things I hold closes to me and transferred them onto acetate.

and then painted them all in

at this point the walls of the box were divided into sections to keep the painted pages separate, creating some depth in the scene.

all that was left was to do the outside of the box. I took some of the pages that came from the book and tore them up and pasted them onto the outside to cover all surface. I also added some images torn form a Where's Waldo book as well as some photographs and drawings.

This life box exercise was interesting for me. Exploration of self is something that I have explored before in the studio, and I always find it to be a revealing experience. However, because this followed the mandala assignment so closely, I did not have any trouble of have to invest much thought into what I was going to do for as far as visuals go. The one thing I felt through the creation of this piece was frustration - with the time investment in gluing all the pages of the book together, with the knives I was using dulling quickly and ripping pages, with the glue not adhering to the outer surface of the book, all technical things.