'Living and Dying' Exhibition at the British Museum

The Pharmacopoeia team and 'Cradle to Grave'

I recently went to see Pharmacopoeia (the artistic team consisting of Susie Freeman, Dr Liz Lee and David Critchley)'s 'Cradle to Grave' piece at the Living and Dying permanent exhibition at the British Museum.

One of Pharmacopoeia's most well-known works, 'Cradle to Grave' was created to illustrate the pharmaceutical life of a typical man and woman in modern Great Britain. The piece contains more than 14,000 pills for each person, which is the average amount prescribed during a lifetime.

(This shocking figure and the sheer size of the fabric is an effective way of bringing home the excessiveness of our dependence on pharmaceuticals.)

The piece is fitting with the theme and purpose of the room, which focuses on 'how diverse cultures seek to maintain health and well-being'. It explores our approach to medicinals in our search for a 'healthy' lifestyle and attempts to delay death as effectively as possible.

'Cradle to Grave' is not only made up of pills and tablets, but also of other objects such as photographs depicting personal moments of people's lives (the length of fabric advances in a time-line fashion) and other medical instruments such as syringes, an IV drip, condoms, a wine glass and a dirty ashtray. The photographs reflect personal responses to health, and the other objects represent how people can improve their well-being (through treatments etc.) or harm it (through lifestyle choices such as smoking).

Other pieces in the 'Living and Dying' exhibition show various cultures' approach to well-being and death. There were images of people with a vast quantity of medicinals, while other cultures exhibited traditional techniques and medicines, as is shown in the photos below.

Traditional Chinese medicine - ingredients to make tea, herbal ointment and pills

Marilyn Minter

I found Marilyn Minter, artist and photographer, on the website http://www.whitewallmag.com/ , and thought that she would link in well to some of my previous sample work. My use of red lips with pills greatly resemble some of Minter's work.

While I used the lips to portray people's relationship with medicine, using Susie Freeman's concept but in my own style, Marylin Minter uses her images to create a sense of glamour with a hint of sexuality. The relationship between our two works is that they both convey a perhaps false promise of pleasure.

T-shirts

I decided to create a t-shirt in the style of Katharine Hamnett- by writing a slogan or message in block capitals on a plain shirt. I wanted to write a phrase that made the shirt more relevant to Susie Freeman and the theme of pills that I was developing in my project. 'WHAT ARE THEY FEEDING US?' refers to the quantity of prescriptions people receive, and to how the consumption of medicinals could be harmful as it is often excessive. The props and colours I used for my model are also in keeping with my project.

While Hamnett's designs are manufactured by screen printing, a lack of resources meant I had to use a felt tip for mine. This, however, didn't create the block colour effect that manufactured t-shirts have, and also took quite a long time.

The 'trapping' technique

Susie Freeman's most popular technique is her pocket knitting, which she uses to trap many tiny, hard objects- usually pills- into fabrics. This is a collection of samples I made interpreting this 'trapping' technique through a slightly different process.

While Freeman creates tight, tiny, individual pockets for her pills, I also sowed around each one because I wanted to secure them in place and have more than one pill in each pocket.

Joana Vasconcelos

Joana Vasconcelos (born 1971) is a Portugese textile artist. She is not afraid of entering taboo areas with her art, and often creates pieces that are metaphors to present day issues. For example her most famous piece 'A Noiva' (The Bride) is a chandelier where the regular pendants are replaced by around 25,000 tampons. Vasconcelos did this to address the problem of society still being captive to patriarchy.

A Noiva, 2001

Vasconcelos' use of art as a political statement makes her relevant to my project, as does the use of knitting in her work. Her more recent works include large-scale, colourful, undulating sculptures constructed with colourful hanging cloth.

Joujoux, 2007

Other knitting work that Vasconcelos has done involves placing knitwork over objects and statues.

Happy family, 2006

Vasconcelos' uuse of knitting provides interesting design ideas for my own work.

Pills!

Inspired by Susie Freeman's use of pharmaceuticals in her work to get a point across to society, I created some photographic interpretations of people's relationship to pills.

'Veil of Tears', Wellcome Collection

I went to see one of Susie Freeman and Dr Liz Lee's works- 'Veil of Tears' (2007) at the Wellcome Collection in London.

This particular piece isn't aimed so much at raising awareness about pharmaceuticals in Britain, but considers the problem of malaria to a child in Africa.

"In five years the child will probably have had over 1000 infected mosquito bites, been tested for malaria on many occasions and taken a variety of more or less effective drug treatments. She may also have had life-threatening cerebral malaria and been treated with intravenous chloroquine." Susie Freeman and Liz Lee

'Veil of Tears' shows Freeman using different techniques and materials from her typical 'pocket knitting' and pills. Although the work still uses pills, she also adds other objects to convey a more specific image. For example, she includes small photographs of people of the area in Africa she studied, and a baby doll to highlight the illness' effect on children. This shows that she can adapt her work to fight for different causes while maintaining the essence of her art.