Used tin boxes of medicine, coffee, other utensils, always find their way to hosting something small or something special; things that have no other place (like pins) or things that have to be carefully preserved (like a time capsule or a memory). The tin box will usually be pretty or become pretty with time. It protects. Corrosion doesn't reach you as easily if you are inside a tin box.
Inside a saccharine tin box inside the humble Framers Gallery, protected from dust but not from eyes is a small moth. She is painted on a small button and it all reminds me of an Edwardian entomology box I once bought as a wedding present. There are other boxes, too, some wooden, with Edward Gorey figures on standby. All, a collector's children.
The wall Hannah Battershell occupies is full of beautiful, playful and comforting appropriations of contemporary miniature practises and a lovely reminder of the intriguing and timeless art of boxes, like the ones by the master, Joseph Cornell.
And maybe that is where their essence, and their differences, lie. Cornell was a forced loner, trapped in a house and world due to external circumstance. The stale air in his boxes is full of these smells of decay, loneliness, obsession and illness. And in being so, they enclose something horribly valuable: his whole internal world.
Hannah Battershell's boxes, for the time being, seem to still be letting a bit of air pass through.
more info:
http://www.hannahbattershell.com/
http://www.theframersgallery.co.uk/exhibitions.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/cornell.html
http://thisiscolossal.com/?s=miniature
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