This is the lovely complement I was paid today. It is true. I seem to be being constantly bombarded with potential ideas. It is really quite exhausting though. I have to take my sketch pad and digital camera with me everywhere. Perhaps I should count myself lucky. As I’m sure a wise man once said, it is better to have too many than too few ideas. The irony is that although I am constantly taking photographs of interesting things and coming up with ideas for mini-art projects, I really struggled to come up with a solid idea for my current art project for college. That’s another blog entry though. I digress.
There is a reason my friend paid me the complement: ‘I think it’s wonderful how you see the art in everything’. Last night she posted on to that very popular social media website facebook a picture of her nightly medication. She was making a point about the volume of pills she has to take on a daily basis. What I saw in her posting was art!
The beauty of health
The sense of calm I saw and felt in her photograph somehow made her point even more poignant for me. The pills are there to try to bring harmony to the body where there is chaos. I don’t know if she intended to create something of meaning and beauty, but she did. Perhaps the pills just happened to fall in that pattern. But they sit there, a constellation of medication, and seem to say something. To me they say something about how we strive to live in balance, whether it be physically or mentally. In a sense this picture is an autobiography.
So I decided to take a photo of the pills I take every day. I wanted to create my own medical autobiography.
My not quite so arty pills
This autobiography will change throughout my life. It started out as nothing at all (as far as I remember). There have been periods of more pills (and chances are the older I get the more pills there will be). It would be quite interesting to take a photo once a year throughout life. Ah too late for that.
I like the idea of creating art out of a material that isn’t designed to be used that way or creating art out of a material to make a point about that material.
Pills typically are quite colourful (why is that?) and have lovely shapes. I’m obviously not the first person to have come up with the idea that they could be used for art’s sake (google is your friend here).
Here is another autobiography, of someone who has to take a lot of medication every day for a back condition.
A sea of pills
These pills seem to be moving towards the camera. They are almost marching. I can imagine them jumping as if to vibrations of something. I like the fact that the surface is scraped and in need of repair. I think that says something too.
This next autobiography is from a friend who takes just one pill a day. This is quite a lonely pill, but somehow a happy-to-be-lonely pill. It used to be two pills, now it is just one.
One is a lonely number
I hope to encourage other friends to send me their autobiographies in the form of creative images of their daily medication, whatever it may be. Watch this space.