New Year’s Resolution: 12 Dioramas in 12 Months

We asked for yourcreative New Year’s resolutions— and you sent us more than 100. This year we’ll follow four listeners and hear about their progress.Charis Stiles (of Oakland, California) wrote:

My 2015 resolution is to make one diorama a month. For the past few years, I’ve been making different sized dioramas, but have recently lost steam. The themes have ranged from Lady Gaga, romance novels, tarot cards, the High Holy Days, Mormons, and manatees … In general, I have struggled to maintain motivation and I would love to be held accountable! In 2015 I resolve to make one diorama of any size or theme per month.

January is over, and Stiles has already finished her first diorama (see a photo below). “I wanted to do a reinterpretation of one of these tarot cards called ‘Strength,'” she explains, “so it’s this cat body with a hunky guy’s head smoking a cigar” squeezed into an iPhone box. All of the pieces Stiles uses in her dioramas are found objects — “I’m really cheap when it comes to supplies,” she admits.

While Stiles sees her project more as “craft” than “art,” she finds inspiration from the surrealist Joseph Cornell’s boxes and hopes to add a layer of sophistication to her own work. “This is really pushing me outside my comfort zone as far as just sharing pictures of them,” Stiles says, “so we’ll see if I can get the courage up to do some kind of end of the year show, or they’ll be 12 of them — maybe a calendar.”

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At left, the tarot card “Strength,” at right, Charis Stiles’ interpretation in diorama form

(Courtesy of Charis Stiles)