Empty & Meaningless: the Box Project began in 2000 as a community arts program. Each participant takes a six-sided box, which stands for them, and one relationship that matters. One side holds the complaint. The opposite side holds the wish. The other four are theirs to decide — and the inside stays empty, because the meaning isn't inherited. They get to add it.
I have led it with teenagers, in community workshops, and with incarcerated women at Oregon's Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, where I piloted it in 2003. Here, participants' boxes sit alongside my own: the Poverty Box, which I made as a participant in one of the workshops; the Collection Trees that gather the boxes, welded by me (my first welding, and my last); and Who Are We?, my portrait of some of the women I worked with at Coffee Creek.
