SELECTED WORKS FROM THE container SERIES
CONTAINERS OF CONSEQUENCE: SHIPPING CONTAINERS AND THEIR UNINTENDED DELIVERIES
The modern shipping container has come to deliver the unexpected. Each shipment it sends more closely connects distant landscapes, cultures, communities, economies and political systems. This peripatetic portal pulls people, places and spaces closer together through the seemingly benign global transport of goods. These simple steel boxes are the basis of our globally interconnected economy and yet their role and impact are not always readily apparent. My research into the shipping container questions the impact of the container and the cargo it moves, through creative works that unravel the complexity that has spilled from the global proliferation of container freight systems.
The main question of this inquiry is: How might sculptural works make manifest the intended and unintended impacts that the transport of goods using shipping containers have through their utilization and movement across the globe? This research utilizes sculptural contexts to develop a methodology of manufacture that would make transparent the volume of their activity and address the scale of their impact.
The resultant artworks utilize glass and metal to relate to the building materials of modern cities and to construct ways to elucidate the full scale of the shipping container’s obfuscated form. In these artworks, I engaged with the concept of shipping containers as a singular structure and as part of a system, explore the potential of its volume and layered space as well as expose the measure of its activity to suggest the immeasurable scale of its impact in moving both physical and intangible forms of our world in a way that has delivered our once separate spaces towards a shared endpoint.
