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BOXES beyond borders

Pandora’s Box

Lesley Tannahill
Japan 1995

Where do my thoughts and language come from?

Do they arise out of a chaotic flux of sensations and mental images? Are there some rules or a deep structure underlying this apparent chaos? Is the Right Brain, more intuitive part,  more closely related to the unconscious (if there is such a thing) than the Left, logical, verbal part of the brain? My painting suggests these questions to me. I wonder how the part of me that knows is related to the part of me that doesn’t know what it knows.

In making this box for Women Beyond Borders I am reminded of that wonderfully curious woman, Pandora, who for centuries has been, to my way of thinking, erroneously blamed for all evils on earth. I discovered there’s another version of the story, and it goes like this:

The box which she opened contained everything that was good, and when, (against her husband’s advice) she raised the lid, ALL THAT WAS GOOD escaped out into the world. I like this story and think it’s a fine metaphor for the creative, open-minded nature of womankind.