Medicine Packet #2 Drawing

Poojan is an artist and researcher based in London. Her practice builds on the existing importance of medicines in our lives and explores medicine packets as an independent unit. She focuses on how the routines of everyday pill-taking are intensified when reflected within the frame of contemporary art. She believes the act of discarding a pharmaceutical blister pack is tied to larger questions about everyday human existence. And hence, she finds herself responding to the environmental emergency, not through direct action, but as an artist who engages creatively with the quantity of medical waste we produce every day. She has been experimenting with discarded medicine packets since 2019, thus her studio materials come not just from pharmacies and hospitals, but also from domestic waste - it is routinely produced by herself, her relatives, and her friends. The punctured and buckled surfaces of blister packs have become her primary sculptural medium, and it is the sensation of touch that focuses and motivates her work. She transforms these tactile experiences into a visual arts language using a version of Marvin Minsky’s 'frame theory': ‘by changing the context in which something is represented, its meaning and our response to it also change’ (1975). With this idea in mind, she has developed a way of making empty medicine packets sculpturally ‘strange’ through recontextualization in gallery exhibitions. She strives to make her studio experiments visually striking and, ultimately, she wants to create a contemporary vision of consumer society's intense relationship with medication.