Constance Kiermaier says she is a boxist. She is also a painter, a sculptor, a teacher, a printmaker, a commercial artist, a collagist. “And a mother and a wife,” she adds.
Perhaps it is those last two that give some of her work its richness. A little pink dress that she is sketching was once her own, passed down and worn with love and fancy by all three of her daughters. The boxes she creates, most of them about twice the size of a shoebox, are fitted with intricate representations of people’s lives. There’s a box that has a scrap of a flag and shows a garden by the sea for her father; a box with a fragile eggshell and a cherub to commemorate the birth of a granddaughter; the one for her husband includes commuter train tracks, golf clubs, a martini glass and the dreamy skyline of a faraway city.