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BOXES beyond borders

Category: Sad

Cancer

In the past
people asked me
sometimes
what is your sign
and I said
cancer
because I was born
on the 6th of July.

Now I got the disease
or the disease got me
and I hate
this word:
cancer.

I lost my hair
I lost my breast
and I may lose
my life-
who knows-to
cancer.

But I am not alone
185,000 women a year
are getting it and
we are all asking why
cancer

Why all the poison
in our food, our water,
our air, what did we
do to nature, where
is the F.D.A.? It is not
only tobacco which is
killing us.  How can we
fight the enemy
cancer?

 

Heartease

This box is about joy and renewal. Everything begins and ends, lives and dies in circles. There is such power in each little thought, small gestures and tiny boxes. The heart is a sure image of love, feeling and strength. It has infinite capacity for both great joy and great sorrow, even after the ache and grief of loss:

The core remains intact.

Pink budded, protected

with swathes of leaf,

and occasional thorn.

Pam’s Tear Box

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

Pam Praeger, VICE PRESIDENT OF LEARNING, SPOKANE FALLS COMMUNITY COLLEGE

One of the first things that Pam said to me was, “I don’t know if anyone mentioned it to you but I lost my daughter in May and I’m still struggling with the loss.” She said it almost apologetically. As I got to know Pam it became clear that Tara, the lost daughter, set a high bar for her mother through the lessons she taught the whole family during her dying. I also learned that Pam and Tara are a lot alike. Even in pain Pam’s first impulse was to help me. I knew instinctively that it was also what Tara would have done. I am grateful to Pam and Tara for their generosity and honesty. During our time together Pam cried more than once and each time she seemed at a loss about what to do with her tears. So I’ve made a Magic box for those tears. Its capacity is endless.

Balkan Dance

This traditional Balkan folk dance slipper carries a box holding the grief and terror of deportation and internment as well as hope for endurance and the end of all exiles- physical, political, cultural and spiritual.

Missing Piece

To me, a basic unchanging form is the most beautiful, no matter what period of art you are examining. For any material or event there exists a basic framework. Within this basic frame, there exists a core which comes through the work of art above all else.

I use many materials, but I especially like to use materials with soul in them. I then strive to create a work in which the essence of the materials shows through. I would like to create artwork with a central form of happiness, pain, or sadness.

Face

Soon after the birth of my first child, I became aware of a sense that on a grander scale, all children were my children. Universal.

I am now a grandmother for the first time. Mostly, I am happy. Sometimes I feel sad, maybe a bit jealous because I no longer carry the egg that becomes the baby. Look at my little grandson in utero. He is perfect, just like the one perfect living cell, the egg. What gift this is that we may, “…bring forth those who bring forth.”

Iamthereflectionofyoubutdoyouseetheconfusioninsideofme?

Culver City High School. Grade 11.

Inside of me there is a thin line between depression and happiness. Sometimes I dangle between the two, as if I am suspended on a wire and tied up by my own thoughts. Outside I am the reflection of everyone around me. You look at me and see yourself, see who and what you want to see. Although you look at me forever, you will forever see your own reflection and never penetrate to the inside where I am forever suspended between the two poles of my mind.

Untitled # 1

My love for boxes goes way back in time…It was triggered in me as a child when I was enchanted by all the silken colors, embroidery and sweets that came out of my grandmother’s old wooden box. And at that time, we lived in a yet bigger stone box that reeked of lemon and jasmine flowers. The color of its cover was interchangeable, ranging between bright sky blue to a shade of azure and it seemed as if it were decorated with stars. But there was always someone who broke my boxes that contained me and I them…

Restoration

In Christian vocabulary, the term restoration means bringing oneself back to God who created the earth; saved from darkness; beings in the light; and bringing blessing to this world. This work, by a small community is an offering to the Almighty Highest in the first year of the twenty-first Century. Participants of this community came together to pray for needs that they observed from the mass media. This community and the artist share one faith and believe in the same God. The Box thus represents their prayers which are burdened with the sorrows of history and which brings hope to the future. It is likened to a funeral of sacred history and a birthday party of the new history makers.

 

My World

My box is a small square world, and part of my world is in the box. On opening My World and looking closer one sees part of my individual history. A mirrored reflection of my wedding day. It represents love, culture, and intimacy. The bottom of the box is a coffin.

 

For Ritta

USA/Czech Republic

My sister died before I was a little girl.
She was put in a gas chamber in a
concentration camp.

My daddy was so sad he couldn’t stop
them so he made another little girl right
away so he could forget about Ritta and
be happy again

Only this was not ok with G-d. G-d
thought that this was too fast so he
played a trick on Daddy. He took
Ritta’s soul, which was still very upset
from being starved and gassed and
burned and sent it back to Earth.

Normally a soul would be allowed to
float around out there for a couple
hundred years or more to calm down
after doing Life. So it was shocking for
Ritta’s soul to come back too quickly
and-this was the mean part-to be
stuck in Janicka’s body.

This was very hard for me. I thought I
was supposed to smile. Everyone
wanted me to be a happy pretty little girl
so they could be happy and forget. But,
too bad looked like a bullfrog and I
could tell they thought that and were
ashamed. So no smiles. They didn’t
know about Ritta’s soul and that it took
up so much space may own little heart
didn’t have room to beat.

So along we went, poor starved gassed
and burned Ritta and what was left of
me and no one knew so I was very sad
and lonely. And poor Daddy couldn’t
forget Ritta because she was inside the
little bullfrog.

Grief Repair

All is metaphor, even that which we may take as fact. Human logic is fragile. The box may represent a construct of human logic. Boxes do not occur in nature. It contains wax with the translucency of human skin, threads, a needle and blood. The needle under the “skin” is a metaphor for the grief of women all over the world in their efforts to keep love and the grace of human relationships and community whole, despite a world which seems eternally based on war and conflict. The needle is used for healing. The box is a prayer for continued courage and creativity.

Beatrice’s Box – A Coffin

The figures on the top represent her husband and four children who were all murdered during the genocide. She had to (forced) watch, as her husband was hacked into four or five pieces. Overwhelmed with tears, she could not go any further.
Note the small red heart on the side.