YAYA BOX HISTORY CHAPTER 7

YAYA BOX HISTORY CHAPTER 7

VII. The Unfinished Passage

As the project continued to unfold, life shifted in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Before I could bring the YaYa Box Project to completion, I moved out of state. The move interrupted the momentum of the work, and the thesis exhibition I had envisioned never materialized. Without that culminating exhibition, I did not receive my Master of Arts degree in studio art.

What I had planned was vivid and deeply rooted in my artistic sensibility. I imagined the exhibition taking place in a wooded area in the country — a natural, quiet space that would hold the boxes with the reverence they deserved. I wanted the boxes displayed on tree stumps, each one grounded in the earth, surrounded by the living world that had shaped so much of our internal and external lives.

The location I had chosen was intentionally set apart from where visitors would park. I wanted there to be a physical and psychological transition — a walk through the trees, a gradual shedding of the everyday world — before entering the installation. The journey into the woods was meant to mirror the journey inward that each of us had taken while creating our boxes.

Although the exhibition never came to be, the process itself remained the heart of the project. The work we did — the introspection, the unraveling, the courage, the connection — was the true thesis. The absence of a formal exhibition did not diminish the depth of our discoveries. In many ways, the project lived exactly as it needed to: unfinished, open‑ended, and profoundly transformative.