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Artist Boxes

In 2015 I felt I had to rebalance my creative energies after the large project of Infinity & Dreams, both the series of photographs as well as the book.

Artist Boxes

In 2015 I felt I had to rebalance my creative energies after the large project of Infinity & Dreams, both the series of photographs as well as the book. This was my first book and I did everything from the initial conception, layout, pairing of my photographs with selected quotes from J.L. Borges’ texts, finding a printer and the whole process of getting a book from a dummy to reality.

A tactile project, working with old books felt just right. It was also the time when books were increasingly pushed off center stage by the rise of digital and audiobooks, hence cutting up a book felt less intimidating. I chose to dedicate each box to a woman who had made a great contribution to this world.

The boxes are made of plywood and covered in book print. Watercolor, cut-outs, text, three-dimensional objects and handwritten texts contribute to tell the story about each “portrait”. Finally, the boxes are glazed to improve permanence.

Maria Sibylla Merian, was one of the earliest European naturalists and entomologists and had a learned the art of engraving on copperplates. She is credited with observing and documenting evidence in the late 1670s of the process of metamorphosis of butterflies. Courageously she also travelled to Dutch Guiana and Suriname to sturdy and record tropical insects.

Not less courageous was the American aviator Emilia Earhart who was the first female pilot to fly solo with her single engine Lockheed Vega 5B non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932. She embarked in New Foundland and landed in a pasture in Northern Ireland. She set many more solo flight records until she disappeared on July 2, 1937 over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world.

In literature, English novelist Jane Austen stands out with her plots which explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favorable social standing and economic security. Her use of social commentary, realism, wit and irony have earned her acclaim amongst critics and scholars.

Pina Bausch was a German dancer and choreographer whose work I have much admired since I saw it performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She created the company Tanztheater Wuppertal which performed internationally in the German expressionist dance tradition. Her best known dance-theatre works include the melancholic Café Müller (1978), in which dancers with their eyes closed stumble around the stage crashing into tables and chairs, to arias by Henry Purcell.