Treasure Box by Tom Jones

The Treasure Box Project was an online participatory project organised by AccessArt in 2012. We compiled 50 boxes, full of a variety of found objects and materials, some second hand with a history, some new. The Treasure Boxes were available for purchase (all proceeds to the AccessArt charity) and bought by artists, teachers and parents. The aim: to transform the contents of your box into an artwork.

Explore Tom Jones’s Track in the Box below.

The box and its contents were taken as starting points for drawing. The results – in a marvellous zig-zag book form – range widely across visual and written images, often combining them together in a hybrid sort of handwriting /drawing. Sometimes the balance shifts to text sometimes to graphic communication, and sometimes to representational drawing. It depended on what I wanted to discover, say, explore, communicate or try to understand.

This type of book opens out into a 35 page long Bayeaux tapestry-like frieze, but it is double sided so lends itself naturally to narrative and working in multiple sequences: forwards on one-side, back-wards on the other and between either side of the same page – a network of images and words, as well as linear sequences. The drawings/writings, dated in order day-by-day, track my changing – and sometimes erratic – thoughts and feelings about the box itself (it’s physical shape, the idea of boxes and what they mean to us), and about some of the contents (images, physical objects and in a few instances using them to draw or write). The book evolved into a discursive, exploratory visual/verbal diary-type running commentary evolved and communicated between May 17 to August 6 2012. Finally, I sandwiched the book between the top and the bottom of the box so that the narrative track literally and metaphorically opens up out of the box.

See more Treasure Boxes