“Collecting is a kind of poetry: it’s a shuffling around of objects and spaces until they make sense.”

— Edmund de Waal

I’m thrilled to be part of Tom Buchanan’s colossal project Out of the Box. A journey which started as a series of exhibitions has evolved into a weighty and beautifully composed art book. A compendium of creative works grouped together by the very nature that they themselves are groupings: artworks made from multiple parts, bound by a definite perimeter.

The book is truly a box within a box within a box. The author – an artist himself – has spent years collecting creatives whose works fit within the grand container of the project. No two the same. Simultaneously, he has collected his thoughts, gathering stories and remarks along the way (I particularly enjoy the de Waal quote above, taken from Buchanan’s preface, and Roger Ackling’s quiet reflection on my own page (p.27) that “rituals performed in private change the face of the world”) arriving at something which can only be described as a book to house the ultimate collection of collections.

“As a rule,” the author writes, “creatives tend to be voracious collectors. Seeking, locating, acquiring, classifying, cataloguing, storing, and displaying are all vital practices to aid the artistic soul. However determined these activities might appear to others, they provide some kind of ordered path through the everyday…”

I’m taken back to my pre-art-school self with this book, devouring its pages much as I did with Art Now and The Art Book. Books that you’d browse in order to help you understand yourself as a creative, what excited you. And I’m then transported to the artist I was soon after graduation, struggling to navigate post-art-school life, creating compilation artworks with old boxes and drawers as their frames, finding stability within a physical boundary, organising and ordering my collected artefacts in a way that did indeed help me find a path “through the everyday.”

“Maybe a box can help us let go, or allow us to question the very interior of things…”

— Tom Buchanan

I think more than anything else, I’m moved by this book because you can tell that the entire endeavour has been pursued with a heartfelt passion. This is more than a who’s who of box-artists, this is an artwork in its own right. And for me, the cherry on the top is that the author notes our “need to upcycle”, to use and re-use what we already have, what we can find, and how box-art plays perfectly to that sustainable brief (Mark Thurgood’s Collecting Yellow, captioned as “nearly all plastic waste found on one Cornish beach over ten years” is just one such example). Box-art, then, is “an alternative space, filled to the brim with potential…” (Sarah Lea: Box Art – An Art-Historical Context)

Collecting is a Kind of Poetry