All Work Laid Out

Final Project

Final Project: Medicine/Experiment Cabinet

General Materials: various different bottles/containers, various pills, candy, flowers, various found objects, various liquids, wood, paint, and ink.

The entire feel of this piece was meant to be medical/experimental, but also have a personal touch that the viewer could pick up on. I wanted this to be an interactive piece, where the viewer would get up close and really view each object closely and pick up the ones that were meant to be. 

I chose to display the bottles as medical solutions on shelves to hint at a medicine cabinet, but I wanted to keep the shelves simple to not take away from bottles. They were painted white to keep the simplicity, but still hint at the medical feel. I chose to hand label the name of the "medical solutions" on the cabinets to keep a personal touch to the piece. As much as I wanted to hint at a medical feel, I also still wanted to balance that with a very personal feel so that people wouldn't be afraid to approach and get up close to the piece.

Most of my influence for this piece was personal influence. Throughout this semester I spent some time in and out of the mental health floor of the hospital battling my own mental illness. I especially had a hard relationship with medication and pills in a few different ways, so this project (and the Drawing On Objects) was a way for me to turn the pills into art, and helped me overcome a huge struggle. The labels were all based off of things that I have struggled with or still struggle with, and so I created a "medial solution" for them.

 (A lot of the found objects had a personal connection to the label that others may not have necessarily made a connection to. For example, "Hallucinating" included broken glass and hearts in the heart shaped glass because when I was having bad hallucinations it was about slicing myself open with glass, and in this certain situation my friend was there to help me and he put my hand on his heart to remind me of what was real and what wasn't. A lot of the bottles also have actual pills in them that really do correlate with the labels, such as antidepressants in the "Down", anti-anxiety in "Anxiety", etc. It seemed a little random to some people, so I thought this explanation was needed.)

  If you look closely in the bottles you will see a lot of the pills have messages written on them, which are all either messages for me or about me. Overall, I think this piece ended up almost representing me like a self-portrait in a way. But I also wanted it to be relatable, and have others be able to respond to it in their own personal way as well.

Drawing On Objects

"Shake" and "Help"

Materials: glass jar, various pills, ink ("Shake")

plastic bottle, pills, ink ("Help")

For both "Drawing On Objects" pieces, my personal goal was to turn something that I struggled with into art. The pills were no longer "pills" to me, there were a small little canvas, they were art. This is personally one of the most beneficial art pieces that I have ever created.

"Shake" has something different written on each of the plain white tablets. When the piece is shaken, you can see a different message each time, much like a very personal version of an 8-ball. I really wanted this piece to be picked up and interacted with, which is why I wrote the word "shake" on the top of the bottle. The sides of the bottle are marked out so that there is a window for the viewer to really see the messages. It was done this way to encourage the bottle to be picked up and shaken around, because otherwise you couldn't see the different messages.

I was going through a hard time when I made this piece, so a lot of the messages were me getting my thoughts out onto a space. There are some personal details about myself in there. But it was also done in such a way that I think others can shake the piece and see not just the artist, but also hopefully themselves in there as well. There were a lot of words that everyone could relate to.

"Help" is made up of 500 pills, all with the word "help" written on them. I chose the word help for this piece because it could mean different things. It could mean that the piece is acting as a cry for help, to represent the struggle that I was going through at the time. It could also mean that the pills were there to help, that the piece was there to of positive use. There are several other ways that the word "help" could be interpreted as well, and I wanted it to be up to interpretation. I didn't want the distraction of the other information, which is why I used ink to scratch out the information left on the label, but I thought the destroyed label added an important element to the piece. Mostly, I wanted to keep this piece representing pills still (just in an altered state), so I kept it in a pill bottle, with the destroyed label, and the original pills with words added to them.

Maps/Diagrams/Charts

"Collage Map"

(3 views) Representational Diagram of a Self Journey

(jar, flowers, band-aid, broken shot glass, and pills) 

These are two very different approaches to this quick challenge. The one I thought more of a physical map, but I used magazine collage to represent it in a loose way. The other represented a self journey through a diagram in a jar. I think I was certainly thinking on both ends of the spectrum of how a "map/diagram/chart" can be represented.

Shadow Drawing

The object that I used for my shadow drawing was a sculpture that I had made myself that was worked with shadow and light, so I thought it was only appropriate to use it for a "shadow" drawing. I tried to use several different light sources to create a variety of shadows, and I used three different types of sharpies to create the line variation of these shadows. The darkest shadows got the thickest sharpie, medium for medium, thin for lightest. I chose to represent shadow with lines as an aesthetic choice. 

I also used tape transfers, tape, and string in the final shadow drawing to create movement in the piece.