The Box That Won a Prize

It started, as these things often do, with somebody asking me to make something.

My friend Pat was entering an allotment display at the Southport Flower Show and needed a box in which to arrange some of the fruit, vegetables and flowers she had grown.

She could, of course, have used an ordinary wooden box.

Unfortunately, she asked an artist to make one.

There is always a danger in doing that.

A plain wooden box would have fulfilled the brief perfectly well. It would have held the produce, sat neatly on the table and done everything a box was required to do.

But somewhere between being asked to make an allotment box and actually making one, I started wondering what an allotment box could be.

And once that happens, there is usually no going back.

I made the box from wood, but instead of leaving the front plain, I decided to put the allotment itself onto it. Across the front I drew a little landscape: a greenhouse, raised beds, fencing, a wheelbarrow, a tree and all those familiar bits and pieces that turn a patch of earth into somebody’s particular corner of the world.

Then I burned the entire drawing into the wood by hand with my fire writer.

No laser engraving. No machine reproducing a digital image. Every line was made by hand, with heat and wood and the occasional smell that tells you you’ve lingered in one spot for slightly too long.

That’s one of the things I love about pyrography. You may be holding the tool, but the material gets a vote. Wood grain changes direction, different areas burn at different rates, and a line you intend to make is never quite as predictable as a line drawn on paper.

Eventually, the ordinary wooden box Pat had asked for had become a one-off object.

Then I handed it over.

As far as I was concerned, my part was finished.

Pat did the important bit: she filled it.

Suddenly the little allotment I had drawn across the front had become three-dimensional. Grapes tumbled over one corner. Blackberries appeared behind them. There were striped tomatoes, carrots, sweetcorn, an aubergine, courgettes and squash, surrounded by the flowers and other produce she had grown.

Looking at the photographs afterwards, that is perhaps my favourite part of the whole thing.

I had made a two-dimensional representation of an allotment in burned lines across a piece of wood. Pat then filled the space behind it with the real things that an allotment produces.

Drawing became object.
Representation became reality.

Neither of us had planned that.

Off it went to the Southport Flower Show.

And the bloody thing won First Prize.

There is a certain amount of shared ownership involved here, obviously. Pat grew the beautiful contents, arranged the display and entered it. I designed, built and hand-burned the box that held everything.

I’m therefore claiming a perfectly reasonable percentage of the glory.

I might have remained terribly modest about my contribution had Pat not subsequently sent me a photograph of the winning display accompanied by the message:

“I think it was the box that did it xxx.”

Well, if she insists.

What I particularly like about all of this, though, isn’t really the prize.

It’s how it started.

Nobody set out to create an award-winning object. There was no grand artistic statement behind it and certainly no plan to impress a judge.

Somebody simply needed a box.

I could have made exactly that.

Instead, I asked the question that so often gets me into trouble:

What else could it be?

That tiny question is responsible for an awful lot of things I’ve made over the years.

There is nothing wrong with making something purely functional. Sometimes a box should simply be a box. But when there’s an opportunity to add imagination, personality or just a little unnecessary beauty, I find it almost impossible not to take it.

The extra effort doesn’t always need justification.

It doesn’t need to make something more valuable. It doesn’t need to turn it into a product. It doesn’t even need anyone else to notice.

Sometimes making an ordinary thing a little less ordinary is reason enough.

This particular ordinary thing is now completely unique. You can’t buy another one. Searching online won’t find it. There isn’t a second tucked away on a shelf somewhere waiting to be ordered.

There is just this one.

Pat has it.

And now it has a First Prize to its name.

So, with profound apologies to Omar Khayyám:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
I won the competition.