Most people wake up in a box. The box we wake up in, which we call “bed,” is inside of a bigger box we call “room.” From these boxes, we may enter different boxes inside our mega box we call “home.” We enter and exit our boxes within boxes through rectangular boxes, called “doors.” Eventually, we may pour some food out of a box, get into our box with wheels, and drive to the box that we use to make money, called “work.” The boxes we live in are mostly made of other boxes; the boards and beams that are the bones of our box world are milled from the organic and dynamic shapes of the beings of our natural world.
As far as I am aware, of all the beings on our glorious planet, we humans are the only species that choose to live in the box world. Birds live in nests, bears live in caves, and trees live in a forest whose non-linear contours mirror that of the tree itself. As humans, we are non-linear like birds, bears, and trees. However, instead of living in an environment and having a niche which is circular and filled with irregularities, we demand order in a world where our laws of science tell us disorder is inevitable. The construction of a box world provides us humans with an illusion of order in a naturally- and perfectly- disordered world.
I’ll be the first to attest that the box word is a comfy world. I enjoy sitting in a warm box and staring into a bright and glowing box as I am right now. My box world feels safe and my existence in the box world allows the natural world to feel adventurous and filled with mystery. Being the only species that I am aware of to exist in the box world, however, it is lonely. I imagine that there is a sense of community, of being a part of something greater, for the birds, bears, and trees, and countless other beings that live in the natural world, unboxed from the civility of linear life we humans enjoy. That feeling, the notion of being a part of something grand and larger than the individual, is what we humans have labeled as “spirituality.” Words and their definitions are one of the oldest forms of boxes.
As an artist, my role is simple: to humbly express my feelings and inspirations in order to inch closer and closer to chaos, to the organic world, and to the realm of perfect disorder. Most of the tools I use come in boxes, or maybe the tools themselves are shaped like a box (my forge is literally a box filled with fire). Furthermore, the medium itself is often a box, such as a square piece of metal or a cut section of lumber. Ironically, the action of my art is a process of chiseling the medium back to its organic and chaotic state. I will pound the edges of machined steel to mimic the organic surface of a plant’s stalk or bend the edges of a steel feather in hopes of capturing the feeling of being airborne in the sky. Whatever action I am taking, I am going backwards in human terms and tiptoeing out of the box world into the natural world. When we leave the box world, even for a moment, we connect with the countless other beings on this earth and become something greater than ourselves. Art is spirituality.
