Cornell Box

For my English Class about Collecting, we had an assignment to make a Cornell Box.  Joseph Cornell was an artist most known for his assemblages of collaged images and objects.  He organized the assemblages in boxes, creating surreal spaces through the collection and placement of imagery.

Our assignment was to create our own Cornell Box using images or objects we collected.  In the class, we had been discussing how objects gain meaning through being in a collection, how  objects are added or removed from a collection, and how the objects create context and change the meaning of the other items in the collection.  We learned about motivations to collect, methods of display, and the variety of collectors and collections.  It would be impossible to summarize everything we learned here, but the Cornell Box assignment was meant to exercise what we discussed by applying it to a collection of our own.

I had been collecting and carrying around some objects from various different places.  I happened to have brought some of them to school with me, intending to create some sort of artwork with them to solidify memories of my hometown.  I used those, and new items I had collected to create this box.  I wanted the box to have themes of outer space, life cycles, growth and development, and the fuzzy line between the natural and the created.

These are the items I chose, in order as if reading the box from right to left:

Upper Section of Box

4 shells from the Monongahela River
1 deer leg bone from Frick Park
1 piece of wood with a large knot that separated
2 Mourning Dove wing feathers, collected when I was in grade-school
1 metal ring from near a train track
1 piece of once molten steel refuse from a slag dump
1 small Sassafras Tree branch with empty Sassafras Swallowtail chrysalis
1 Cicada skin
3 Water Caltrop seeds
1 Railroad spike

Middle section of Box

12 plastic HO scale sheep
1 blue and white marble, dug up in my backyard in grade-school
1 piece of slag suspended with wire

Lower Section of Box 

2 pieces of Turtle shell found at Storm King Sculpture Garden
2 ceramic shards found along the Monongahela River
2 pieces of blue glass found along the Monongahela River
  

My Cornell Box is currently living in the Honors Lounge at Temple University.



Examples of boxes made by Joseph Cornell.  Images from http://www.artchive.com

Joseph Cornell
Untitled (Cockatoo and Corks)
c. 1948
Construction
14 3/8 x 13 1/2 x 5 5/8 in.
Private collection

Joseph Cornell
Untitled (Medici Boy)
1942-1952
Construction
13 15/16 x 11 3/16 x 3 7/8 in.
Estate of Joseph Cornell