Transubstantiation poembox

I created the Transubstantiation poembox in 2017; it was published in Moonchild Magazine in November 2021. See more info on my poembox project.

Ingredients

Dimensions: 13” x 5” x 4”

  • Wood box from thrift store

  • Rabbit fur from Yesica’s old cut-up coat

  • Sticks from Yesi’s yard

  • Florist foam

  • Gold (Ghirardelli) pencil

  • Dirt from my backyard when I lived in Denver, spray painted silver

  • Spray paint (silver, bronze, and gold)

  • Paper (nothing special, standard printer paper)

  • Print of RCW 108 nebulae, Milky Way (page 72 in Space Odyssey book)

  • Bindis from my last trip to India

  • Plastic jewels

  • Selenite from the broken tower

  • Bone (vertebrae) from the DCP science closet

  • Leaded crystal prism from wedding

  • Druzy stone

  • Copper plastic thread

  • Thumbtack

  • Superglue

  • Elmer’s glue stick

  • Epoxy 6000

  • Rubber cement (mixed into dirt)

  • Spinal column flash card (thanks, Yesi)

  • White feather

  • Gold ribbon leftover from a gift someone once gave me

  • Needle

  • Petrified wood that I've had since I was a child

  • Red paint

  • Pinecone from backyard

  • Large glass marble I've had since college in the 90s

  • Miscanthus Sinensis

  • Time (six months to create plus another one to take the photographs)

Artist statement

I began my poembox project when I was in a marriage I needed to leave in a town I needed to leave but it wasn't time to go yet, and two dimensions—poems on a flat page or screen—were not enough to get lost in. So I began to make poemboxes, or sculptural interpretations of my poems in box format.

Boxes: Intrinsically contained and containing.

But what if I slipped this scalpel-like knife through paper, thread, animal skin, invisible skein to rip dimensions? Here's a place we can dwell, inhabit, if just for a minute.

I grew up visiting the Cornell boxes at the Art Institute of Chicago and I still do.

How much place a boundaried space can contain. Looking in and through like a telescope. Or reverse: microcosm.

Move around, view from different angles: I built these things as playgrounds. I want to touch, see what happens, when.

I use organic elements and spray them with preserving toxins but everything decays (us too), and my boxes have ridden I-90 back to the Midwest, arrived a bit more broken-in but aren’t we all, anyway, these days.

I made these boxes to save myself. By creating a small world, contained and safe enough to get lost in, escape became attainable.

Feeling out where boundaries exist by crossing them.

All of my poemboxes expand beyond borders to display their contents exteriorly; they grow outside themselves. This I wish for myself, too, and you.