Kristen Eckmann’s vision

Kristen Eckmann likes to create art by putting things she finds inside of other things. The 23-year-old artist refers to these works as “container art.” Some of her containers are open and accessible; others are sealed forever — treasures trapped in a block of artificial ice.

She uses things such as pods, wasp nests, strings, rope, wax, discarded window frames and handmade paper to create two- and three-dimensional art. Eckmann’s work is on display this month at the Intown Arts Center and Gallery on Columbia Street in Bangor.

A wooden box sits in the window of the cooperative gallery. Inside the box rests a wad of cotton batting tightly wrapped in thick rope. Pieces of frayed, rough rope decorate the outside of the box like the dangling tentacles of a jellyfish. A long rope is attached to the front, just waiting for someone take it up and haul the object away.

“I made this last summer,” says Eckmann, dressed in the uniform of her generation — T-shirt, overalls, platform shoes, hemp jewelry around her neck, piercings adorning her face. “I got the idea from a Robert Bly story called `The Bag We Drag Behind Us.’ He says that we are born with this invisible bag that we drag around behind with us. We throw all the things our parents tell us not to do or be in there, along with our undesirable qualities.

“This piece is my bag. It’s made out of the inside of the security pillow I had as a child. It finally fell apart, so I had to give it a place of honor. I wrapped it in rope and secured it in the box, so it would be protected and restrained, so no one could take it, but I could still see it and touch it.”

Eckmann grew up in Orrington and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in 1993. Last year she earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Six months ago, the artist, her husband, Ben, a merchant marine, and their three dogs returned to Maine so Eckmann could pursue her art full time.

“As a kid I was forever in trouble for going into the garage and using my dad’s tools, then breaking my dad’s tools, to make something,” she says. “My dad would be mad, but then I’d show him what I’d made, saying, `But it’s art.’ That’s how I’d get out of it.”

Eckmann found, however, that her use of natural fibers and other objects and the art she felt compelled to create did not fit in with her professors’ vision of what she should be doing. “Detroit was full of metal, neon, metro-urban plastic,” she says. “I tried it, but went back to my first instinct — playing with tools.”

Much of Eckmann’s work combines soft, comforting, seductive things, like her blanket or remnants of industrial felt used to make filters, with hard, rough, abrasive objects such as frayed rope, plastic resin and rough wood. Nowhere is this dichotomy more obvious than in the bronze wall hanging titled “Hurst Study.”

Originally part of a 52-piece installation in an Ann Arbor coffeehouse, the metal pieces, each 4 to 6 inches in diameter, jut out from the wall like the soft petals of prize roses peeking over a picket fence. But they are hard and cold to the touch.

“My brother-in-law was in the Gulf War and had some fragments of shrapnel in his shoulder,” Eckmann says. “They went in and took microscopic photos. It looked like these soft, fluffy pieces of tissue surrounding these shards of hard metal. I made this series from the slides the doctors gave him.”

Eckmann’s most recent work is two-dimensional, which she says is how she begins and envisions her sculptures. She has been creating grids to serve as a base for other activity. Her painting, “The Contents of the Old Woman’s Bag,” shows rocks and a feather strewn across a checkerboard.

“Like any tool, the grid can be used imaginatively or unimaginatively,” she writes in her artist’s statement. “It can produce a regimented-looking organization or it may serve as a base for other activity. Grids need not be as regular as a checkerboard. It serves as a divider of surface, location and relationship of every form to every other form. The grid encourages us to divide our attention equally over the entire structure.”

Yet Eckmann hears those tools in the garage calling her as they did when she was a child. She is beginning to work on sculptures of primitive toolboxes, filled with things made from bone, wood and stone — the hardware of early humans. Part of her return to the garage is practical, the other artistic.

“I don’t know where these ritualistic fetishes are coming from,” she says. “If I know that, then I can control it, make more sound decisions about which materials will work better together. Sometimes the materials just sing as I work with them, but then the final outcome is messy. I need to work on my craftsmanship.”

The works of Kristen Eckmann will be on display at the Intown Arts Center and Gallery, 42 Columbia St., Bangor, through May 28. Gallery hours are 11:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.