Box Project

It’s already a tradition for the Illustration department: at the beginning of the second year students give a five-minute public presentation. Everything is allowed, everything is possible, the only requirement is that all of the student’s presentation materials must fit into a cardboard moving box.

In the beginning I found it a difficult assignment because you needed to research yourself. That’s not something you do so easily. Still, at a certain point I found it quite interesting to think about why you do the things you do.

I came to realise that I prefer to invent things while I’m in busy making them, as I go along. So when I got stuck at one point during the assignment, my solution was to just go on working and trying things out. I wanted to turn the box into a head: to give the audience a glimpse of what’s inside my own head. I’m always busy in my head and I often have a hundred thousand ideas, so I thought: why not just show them all? The final result was a big, crazy, colourful box filled with many little boxes and curiosities, like a little world of its own.

I’m quite pleased with the result. In the beginning I was afraid it might turn out to be an uncoordinated mess, but in the end all the parts really fit together, and really fit with me as well. For this assignment we were allowed to work in whichever way we pleased. Illustration is so broad, there are so many different ways to approach it. I chose to work with clay, spray cans and acrylics, so that I could present the broadest possible image of myself.

I learned to get to work even faster and to go on experimenting, so that you can see at once what works and what doesn’t. I always like to jump into an assignment head-first, with a blank sheet and without too many expectations of the desired results. My advice to other students working on this assignment would be: allow yourself to be surprised, so that you can surprise others.

Photography: Gert-Jan Pos