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.