Safely Contained - Packing It All In


Hotel Eden by Joseph Cornell


Soap Bubble Set by Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell collected objects and placed them inside boxes - creating strange juxtapositions and narratives. A Map, a pipe, an egg, a glass combined using a grid system as a compositional device. These strange assemblages and collages give new meanings to discarded objects.

Rachel Whiteread deals with negative space - the space under a chair, in front of a book case or in an empty room. In 'Embankment' Whiteread used the empty space inside a card board box - giving form where there isn't any. In Tate Moderns Turbine Hall, she created a gigantic labyrinth-like structure, entitled EMBANKMENT, made from 14,000 casts of the inside of different boxes, stacked to occupy this monumental space. The form of a cardboard box has been chosen because of its associations with the storage of intimate personal items and to invoke the sense of mystery surrounding ideas of what a sealed box might contain.

Olivia Parker 'Pods of Chance' 1977

The Photograph is the perfect Frame - containing the world (see The Frame).