In his mind’s eye, the American artist Joseph Cornell traveled the European continent without ever leaving his Queens apartment. “He was an armchair voyager,” says Sarah Lea, the curator of a major survey of his work, “Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust,” opening at the Royal Academy in London tomorrow. “Europe was not just a source of inspiration for him, it was a long-distance love affair that sparked a wanderlust of the mind.” The former textile salesman’s imaginary travels began in Manhattan junk stores, where he amassed the vintage maps, travel guides, toys and ephemera that were the building blocks of his surrealist assemblages. Cornell’s found-object aesthetic — which pays tribute to his many interests, from vaudeville to Renaissance art to his beloved prima ballerinas — remains influential. Here, we round up three contemporary box artists whose work, like Cornell’s, is the product of a life of collecting.
Angela Fawcett
Angela Fawcett has a magpie’s eye for trinkets and childhood mementos. A veteran of the antiques world, she painstakingly arranges her finds in letterpress trays from the turn of the century. “It all started three years ago when I was given a beautiful glass-fronted box with lots of compartments,” she says from her home studio in East Sussex. “I filled it with keepsakes – dried flowers, tribal beads and unworn jewelry — and got so much pleasure from the process that I haven’t stopped making them since.” Most compulsive of all, for Fawcett, is the placing of the treasures that she picks up in the nearby antiques havens of Brighton and Battle. “I fiddle about for hours moving things from box to box until they look right,” she explains. “Juxtaposition is all-important.”
Peter Gabrielse
It wasn’t until his twilight years that Peter Gabrielse, the son of an antiques dealer who worked as a set designer for 30 years, began making box sculptures. Now 77, the Dutch native spends his summers traveling around Europe gathering materials for the Lilliputian interior scenes he constructs in his studio throughout the winter. With their salvaged decorative elements and handmade furnishings, these intricate mises en scène mirror the timeworn patina of the artist’s 18th-century Normandy chateau. “The atmosphere of my house is exactly the same as my sculptures,” says Gabrielse, just back from a sourcing mission at a French antiques fair, some 100 kilometers away. “My friends always joke that I am living in ‘one of your artworks.'”
Kaori Tatebayashi
“I always wondered what forms ceramics could take, besides domestic tableware,” says Kaori Tatebayashi, who grew up in Arita, a Japanese town famed for its porcelain. Today, from her studio in West London she recreates real-life objects in clay, using an armory of techniques, from throwing to coiling to slab building. “It’s fun to figure out whether it’s even possible to remake the objects I find at local markets,” she says of the unglazed ceramics that she groups together in ethereal tableaux inside upturned milk crates. “It’s like I’m making ghost versions of everyday objects,” she says. “And just like photographs, they’re lasting evidence of the fleeting moments of life.”
“Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust” is on view July 4 – Sept. 27 at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD, royalacademy.org.uk.
