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.