WHAT WE KEEP IN BOXES...

“It seems to me that all the things that we keep in boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box. That the unobserved is both there and not.”
John Green

Animals, Creatures & Symbols Collection - Outside the Box

​For the last year I have been fascinated with designing and creating boxes. It has only been in the last couple of months or so that I truly began wondering what creating all of these boxes was really about. My artistic projects and creations have always been seeded and seated within an ongoing dialogue with the source of my existence. Every painting, photograph and creation that I have made has been the result of a moment of the imaged and expressed conversation between myself and God. In my artistic statement I refer to them as “...messages or moments of awareness and contact. They are whispers from the place where the veils between worlds are thin.” 

So how do these boxes with images of pin-up art, various fantasy worlds, retro and vintage images and creatures fit into this same frame of reference? Honestly, when I really began to think about it I was stumped. When I really began thinking about it I found myself wondering how I had not really thought about it before now. I even found myself thinking that maybe it would be best if I stopped making them and returned to my easel and yet I found I could not. Over and over again I found myself sifting through images, delighting in the use of a razor blade to extricate them from where they had previously been bound, and then arranging and rearranging them with other images and the shapes and contours of the boxes, utilizing various painting techniques to prepare the boxes for their arrival upon them. I was and am absolutely enchanted with the entire process. 

Although creating boxes is new for me, a love of boxes is not. I am one of those people who will experience a deep sense of satisfaction at the discovery of a box, whether the discovery be on the shelves of a thrift store, a gift that someone has given me or through a random and joyous act of the universe. This love affair has gone on for quite some time. So in some ways, I guess it is not so surprising, and yet I continued to feel like I was missing something. The something being “the point”.

The point, albeit hazy at first, started coming into focus over the last month or so…

2016 was one of the most challenging years of my life. By the end of 2015, I had undergone months of slow carbon monoxide poisoning in the casita that I was living in in New Mexico. My father would pass away in May of 2016. In August I would end the leases that I had on the 4 properties that I used as my business, empty all of the contents from the houses and studio and load them into a Budget rental truck and begin the journey across country to Maine in order to move to my then boyfriend’s home where we had decided to move for financial reasons and as a way to be closer to my mother following my father’s death.

Looking back now, I know that I could not truly take in that I was actually leaving New Mexico. I began traveling there in 2008 to study and by 2012 I had moved there. She and all that she held had become one of the greatest love stories of my life. As the rental truck moved across the border of New Mexico and into Colorado to begin the trek to New England, I remember feeling so disjointed and unclear as to how or why this moment had come to pass. The 3 years that I lived held within her desert and mesa filled arms remain among the most formative of my life. I had dreamt of those arroyos, mesas and canyons long before placing my feet upon their soil.

Turquoise Soul (detail) - Initiations & Transitions Gallery

Dream of a Winged God

Above is an ocean of cerulean blue.
Cliffs formed from layers of sand and story rising to greet the sky
A solitary wind howls and moans.  
The wind’s voice seems to carry the sound of a name that I cannot quite hear.

I am holding my son’s hand and we are walking through this pregnant canyon
    There is a slight pause, 
            an irregular beat in the rhythm of space
It is enough to reveal that we are in the land of dreams
Off in the distance I see a large bird soaring through the open sky.
The great bird approaches 
my mind tries to comprehend the truth of the message that my eyes continue to send.
As the distance between us closes, the illusion fades in its entirety and I am left standing in the presence of an approaching god.

In his wings span the centuries of time 
    painted in the flame of turquoise, gold, white and copper
Trails of wind left by his soaring wings push down upon us with the force of a gale.
In passage of the wind from his wings is a song that sings of the deepest rivers of sadness.
In the passage of the wind from his wings is the hope for a people and of a place.
In the passage of his wings are the threads of songs that are unraveling and forgotten – lost in the holes of time.
In the passage of the wind from his wings is an embrace, which holds the breath of hope – eternal return
Tears swell from in ancient eternal river and I weep at the aching love story, 
    An ancient, rooted song so old and so fragile,

As the feathers of his wings brush by my head, 
    he rises and shoots straight into the painted sky.
The sky opens and an emblem of beauty is revealed.  
    Ancient symbols dancing to form a magical portal, a door.
    Designs formed from the color of clouds, gilded feathers, stones that sing, and the metal made from stars receive him into the heavens from which he came.
I am left in the wake of a passing deity
    holding my small son’s small hand
        Listening to the wind echo the lament and sadness that has been conveyed by his proximity.
The wind’s voice seems to carry the sound of a name that I cannot quite hear.             
 …blowing through the canyon from the time in the memory of before.

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There are stories upon stories within those years. Stories of clay pits, vision quests, sweat lodges, bears, arroyos, monsoons, gardens, studios, love, loss, life and medicine but for the purposes of this moment what I will say is that when I left there, part of me stayed behind and it has taken quite a long time to catch up and find its way back home. 

The Budget rental truck continued rolling down the highways between here and there and eventually we arrived in the tiny coastal Maine town that was to become home. After my years in the desert, my heart and soul longed to sit by the ocean and to be held by her embrace. However, my time sitting at the edges of her shore was to be brief. Within a week of arriving my mother came to visit and in her visit held the news that she too was dying. Within 2 weeks of arriving in Maine, I found myself at the doorstep of my childhood home. I would sit in what was only months before my father’s chair and I would become my mother’s caretaker as she prepared to leave this world. 

There are stories upon stories that were held within those six weeks between the time that I arrived on the doorstep to become my mother’s caretaker and when she slipped into a coma and took her last breath. I wish I could say that the time I spent with my mother before her death was what I had imagined it would be like. I had always known that I would fulfill this role and that this was part of the agreement that she and I had made. There was the part of me that had envisioned this as an opportunity for my mother and I to wrap our relationship in a neat and tidy bow but life and death tend to be messy business and a daughter and mother trying to hold hands as one’s eyes close to this world can sometimes look like both struggling to breathe. 

The Glow of Home - Vision Shift Gallery

​I made the decision to spend the winter in my parents’ home, my childhood home. I spent the days and nights keeping the stove burning and cleaning out their closets, room and life. Everyday I would walk past the urns that held their ashes and think about how one day I would write a book called “My Winter in the House of Ashes”. I was surprised when spring came knocking and just as they had in every year past, blades of grass began pushing up and the days grew warmer. In April, I drove out of the driveway for the last time and headed to the place where I would begin to start again. 

Are you wondering how all of this circles around to the boxes? At some point, I am not really sure when, I began saying that I had put part of myself in a box. I had put it in a box up high on a shelf and I refused to take it down and look at it. There was too much to pull apart, too much to try and reconcile. I did not know how to begin to make sense of who I had become when I was in New Mexico, who I was as an orphan with both of my parents dead. I did not know how to feel like a woman who was not a grieving daughter. Who and how I had known myself to be no longer seemed to apply and neither did my understanding of divinity and God. Those pieces of the story were in the box up high on the shelf in a closet. 

But how do you go on like that when everything in your life has been about cultivating a relationship with your higher power? How do you go on knowing that there is a box that holds the most sacred part of your existence and purpose and you are actively choosing not to open it and look inside? 

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“It seems to me that all the things that we keep in boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box. That the unobserved is both there and not.”
John Green

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​I think for me, the answer is that I began making boxes. Each box being a representation of pieces of myself. If you look at the images that I have selected for the boxes they are not dissimilar to the imagery I use in my paintings. Some of the boxes explore the work of other artists - artists whose shoulders I have been standing on while I have once again begun standing on my own two feet. As soon as I began realizing the role that the boxes were playing and how I actually had been in conversation with the source of my existence the entire time, the boxes began to shift and change. The most recent shadow boxes have become like stories. They still include images of artists who have gone before me, but then “Artist as Keeper of Ancestry & Lineage” has been one of the themes that I have consistently explored. Just today I realized that there is also significance in many of the most recent boxes not having a lid but becoming shadow boxes. 

Whether it is a painting, a photograph, writing, or boxes I believe that the creation of art is medicine.

It feels good to be off the shelf and out of the closet again. It feels good to choose to be open once more. 

Shadow box currently in process.

In art, love and beauty,
​Heather