Small Boxes
26 mixed media sculptures
2013-2015
The moment Stella is dying we must find the thing she’ll be in. I dump a cherished marble collection from a shoebox. After, we carry her casket into the woods, we’ve done this before. It’s February, dark. We attack the ground. There is a quiet funeral. This time I remain out there, standing, staying off the point of severance. Existence will be different now. Everything was fast. Suddenly she had been dying, forcing an insane decision.
By my imagination her still-warm body continues: curled, the container just fitting it. Pausing there, over her new spot, I am wanting to know how long it will take the casket and her contents to freeze. By now the box is gone. I conjure up ground invading her. I recall how impossible that thought felt. Trusting how soil lives, in its peculiar breath, I can still resist.
I feel disjointed aging while she—it—is just being out there. I get crazy urges to dig. To draw her out—I want to see her. I tell myself she’s not down there. She is science now. But some nights in my studio, especially in winter, I start itching and sweating and I look down at my hands and they’ve become a pickaxe and shovel.
That night: eventually my body needs the warm house. I do walk away. Oddly when I enter there are five hundred crystal eyes waiting on the floor.
Selected works: