A Note on Learning to See and Write

I’m still learning how to write about art. How to translate what I see into words that make sense to anyone other than me. For years, I’ve looked at art with this running commentary in my head—connections, questions, feelings—but getting it out onto the page has felt impossible. Like there’s a gap between what I understand intuitively and what I can articulate clearly.

So I’m practicing. Looking at pieces in my collection, sitting with them, and trying to capture what they’re doing, what they’re saying, why they matter. This is one of those attempts—not perfect, not polished, but honest. A way of learning to see by learning to write.

Unused Coping Skills: Monica Marks’s Quiet Meditation on Mental Health

Monica Marks’s Unused Coping Skills (2021) sits on my wall, a compact assemblage that somehow contains multitudes. The piece is housed in a vintage cigar box—AVO No. 9 Tubos, made by hand in the Dominican Republic. Inside this weathered container, a set of Allen wrenches hangs from a keychain, nailed to a piece of raw wood. The wrenches are deeply rusted, their surfaces oxidized to a mottled brown patina. A label maker strip—black background, white text, each word on its own line—names what we’re looking at: “UNUSED / COPING / SKILLS.”

It says so much with so little.

The Allen Wrench as Metaphor

Let’s start with the tool itself. An Allen wrench—that L-shaped hexagonal key that comes with every piece of IKEA furniture you’ve ever assembled at 2am, cursing the instructions. It’s designed to tighten, to secure, to fix things that have come loose. This keychain holds multiple sizes, each one calibrated for a different need, conveniently attached so they’re always accessible when you need them.

Except these haven’t been used. The rust tells that story—not just surface discoloration but deep oxidation, the kind that happens over years of exposure and neglect. They’ve been hanging there, accessible, ready—but untouched. The nails holding them in place look equally corroded, as if everything in this little shrine has been suspended in time.

What Are Coping Skills, Really?

We collect coping skills throughout our lives. Sometimes we seek them out—therapy, self-help books, well-meaning advice from friends. Sometimes they’re thrust upon us: “Have you tried meditation?” “Just exercise more.” “Deep breathing works for me.” “Journaling really helps.” We accumulate them like tools in a drawer, a whole keychain of strategies we’re supposed to deploy when things get hard.

But Marks’s piece asks the uncomfortable question: What does it mean when they just sit there, rusting?

The Weight of “UNUSED”

That word—UNUSED—is doing so much work. Not “broken.” Not “lost.” Not even “forgotten.” UNUSED. Present but untouched. Available but inaccessible. The label maker formatting emphasizes each word equally, stacking them like a prescription or instruction manual. Clinical. Matter-of-fact.

Does it mean we don’t have the capacity? That we’re too overwhelmed to reach for them? That depression or anxiety or trauma has drained us so completely that we don’t have the bandwidth to implement one more strategy, no matter how potentially helpful?

Or does it mean something darker—that we don’t believe we deserve the relief these tools might offer? That we’ve internalized the idea that we should be able to cope without help, so asking for (or using) these skills feels like admitting failure?

Saturation vs. Application

Here’s what Marks captures so perfectly: We live in an era of coping skill saturation. Mental health awareness has given us an abundance of strategies, techniques, apps, worksheets, therapeutic modalities. But awareness and tools don’t automatically translate to healing.

Sometimes you can have the entire keychain and still not know which wrench fits which screw. Sometimes you’re so exhausted from just surviving that adding “use your coping skills” to the to-do list becomes one more way to fail.

The rust suggests time passing—a lot of it. These skills have been available, maybe for years, but remain untouched. Not because they don’t work, but because using them requires energy, belief, capacity, hope that might not be there yet.

The Container: Luxury Repurposed

The cigar box itself adds another layer of meaning. AVO cigars are premium—this isn’t a cheap convenience store box. It once held something associated with leisure, indulgence, taking time to savor. The dovetail joints visible on the sides show quality craftsmanship.

Now it contains unused tools for survival. There’s profound irony there. A shift from pleasure to pain management. From indulgence to necessity. From the luxury of relaxation to the desperate need for coping mechanisms.

The box’s interior shows its age—darkened wood, wear patterns, the patina of time. Like the wrenches themselves, it’s been around a while. And on the back, Marks has signed and dated it: “Monica Rickler Marks, 2021.” Created during the pandemic, during collective trauma, during a time when everyone’s coping mechanisms were tested beyond capacity.

What Marks Understands

Monica Marks’s work centers on mental health, but she approaches it with the brutal honesty of someone who knows that awareness isn’t the same as healing, and tools aren’t the same as transformation.

Unused Coping Skills doesn’t shame anyone for not using what’s available. It doesn’t offer solutions or instructions. Instead, it simply holds space for that gap—the vast, painful distance between what we know we should do and what we’re actually capable of doing. Between the strategies we’ve collected and the bandwidth we have to implement them.

It’s a meditation on the quiet reality that sometimes the hardest part isn’t learning new coping skills. It’s having the capacity to use the ones we already have.

The Reliquary Effect

There’s something almost devotional about how Marks has arranged this piece. The box functions like a shrine or reliquary—a sacred container for objects that are supposed to save us. The wrenches hang like offerings or artifacts, preserved but powerless.

We’re meant to look at them, not use them. And maybe that’s the point. Sometimes acknowledging that we can’t use our coping skills yet is more honest than pretending we’re fine. Sometimes witnessing our own struggle without judgment is the only coping skill we have capacity for.

The Allen wrenches hang there still, rusted but present. Maybe waiting for the moment when we finally have the energy to reach for them. Maybe just bearing witness to how hard it is to keep ourselves together when we’re already coming apart.

Or maybe—and this feels important—maybe Marks is suggesting that the real coping skill isn’t using the wrenches at all. Maybe it’s being able to look at them honestly, to name them as unused, to hold the complexity of having tools we can’t access without adding shame to the equation.

That label maker text isn’t an accusation. It’s just a fact. Unused coping skills. No judgment. No prescription for what to do about it. Just acknowledgment that this is real, this is hard, and sometimes the most honest thing we can do is name it.

P.S.

Of course, after posting this, my brain won’t stop turning over more layers. (This is how my ADHD mind works—I publish something and immediately see twelve more connections I should have made.)

The Positive Read:

What if unused coping skills aren’t a failure at all? What if those rusted wrenches hanging there untouched are actually evidence of unexpected strength? Maybe we didn’t need them because we were stronger than we realized. Maybe we survived without deploying every tool we collected. Maybe the unused tools are proof that we found other ways through—or that we were more resilient than the world told us we needed to be.

That’s a hopeful reading, and it sits alongside the more painful interpretation without canceling it out. Both can be true. We can be simultaneously struggling and surviving. The wrenches can represent both what we couldn’t access and what we didn’t need after all.

The Art Historical Context:

As someone trained in art history, I should mention the lineage Marks is working within. The assemblage, the found objects, the small-scale box construction—this all points back to Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes. Cornell created these mysterious, poetic worlds inside wooden boxes, filled with found objects, ephemera, and personal symbolism. His boxes were like portable museums of memory and meaning.

Marks is doing something similar but darker, more direct. Where Cornell’s boxes often evoked nostalgia, childhood, and wonder, Marks’s box confronts us with contemporary psychological struggle. It’s Cornell filtered through feminist art’s insistence on naming what hurts, through the mental health awareness movement’s vocabulary, through the pandemic’s collective trauma.

The cigar box format also connects to folk art traditions, reliquaries (as I mentioned), and Latinx/Dominican craft traditions—Marks is working with a container that already carries cultural meaning about craftsmanship, ritual, and preservation.

This isn’t just a clever idea—it’s a carefully constructed object in conversation with art history while speaking directly to our current moment.

“Unused Coping Skills” by Monica Marks