I got a book called ‘Creating Personal Shrines’ by Carol Owen after Jane Cheek showed it to me. (Jane and I tend to inspire each other.) The focus of Carol Owen’s book was creating memory boxes based around family ancestors. Like most contemporary collage, her work is heavy on vintage photos and “ephemera”. Not my thing, but she includes patterns and instructions for creating the boxes. It’s quite time consuming, in that you have to paint foam core board on both sides with acrylic medium, and after it’s dried, you have to wrap it in rice paper. I tried newsprint, as it’s about the same weight, but unfortunately you can’t use cheaper paper in this and expect the same results. You can’t see it in the photo, but the blue paint made the newsprint wrinkle.
Unlike most pieces, this was inspired by the novel I’m writin right now (Mulberry Wands). In this novel, owls feature predominantly, so I’ve been thinking about them. I started by painting the back of the main box blue, and I printed stars on it with a commercially purchased foam stamp set. I also painted the inside of the roof of the box (though as you can see in the photo, I ended up not attaching it.)
For the main box, I painted two pictures of owls in watercolor on 140lb cold pressed paper. The branches are from our tangerine tree, which has been having a few rough years and has plenty of dead wood to spare. Once I put the branches in, I chose the owl picture which worked better. Lucky for me, the original size of the painting was suitable, so I didn’t have to print out a copy, I was able to use the original.
Next, I covered the lower box with the aubergine metallic paper, and I painted the inside flat black. Soon after that, I decided I wanted to put a glass sheet in front of the box, like a specimen display. (For anyone trying this at home, use a real glass cutter, not an oblong piece of tungsten carbide, especially if you’re going to wrap it in copper foil afterward.) I knew that if I painted it with black or silver, it would have a nice mirrored effect, so I kept with the night theme and painted the waxing and waning moon. I made the moons small so that they wouldn’t obscure whatever was in the box.
I knew I wanted to incorporate the feather somehow. I found this feather in my chicken coop, and it seemed to suit. I was going to drape it across the top, but then there was space below that needed something. At this point I decided to put it along the bottom, and find something else later to put on the roof.
So what to put in the box? I was working with a deliberately limited color scheme, so I wanted something white or blue. Something dark wouldn’t show up. Owls are killers, and they’re silent, so there’s a sense of coldness. Bones are also cold and silent, and I liked the creepy-yet-scientific idea of a bone. This is a real cat bone. I’m pretty sure it’s the pelvis. My daughter found the cat skeleton in our bushes, and she said I could have one of the bones. I put it in the box and wedged the glass in front to keep it in.
She also said I could have the bones from her owl pellet at school, but hers were kind of gross, and I didn’t feel like cleaning mice ribs because they break so easily. Jane helped me out here too, in that she gave me the contents of an owl pellet that had been sanitized. I used one of the mouse skulls for another project (The Trickster, an art doll that’s still on www.cagedfaeries.com), so I had one left. I rubbed it with silver and blue mica pigments, and set it experimentally on the roof. It was too small.
Last night I started a stained glass class, and the instructor had us practice cutting circles in plain and bubbled glass. When I cut this circle out, I realized I had a good use for it. I ground the edges to make them smoother (or at least not sharp enough to slice). The bubbled glass works as a halo to draw attention to the mouse skull.
This piece is just under twelve inches tall, and six inches wide. At its widest, it’s three and a half inches.
