Walked

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Empty blister packs stitched together

450 x 270 x 350 cm
Hypha Studio London, June 2024

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The value we attach to used blister packs depends in good part on our understanding of their past function. Once the tablet pockets are empty, the packaging loses both functionality and meaning. If you are used to throwing the packs away, then an alternative function and an unexpected understanding creates questions. The difference between a routine attitude and an unfamiliar value is, perhaps, the most creative tool a contemporary artist can employ. With these thoughts in mind, the immersive aesthetic experience created by the Walked installation is not expected. It involves a sensorial encounter in which the disposable packs are no longer disposable. They are experienced differently and becomes something that they were never intended to be. They were meant to be landfill. And this difference is important if you are concerned about the amount of landfill generated by medical packaging. I find myself responding to environmental emergency of empty blister packs, not as a direct political statement, but as an ongoing, and ever-changing, experiment with artistic representation.

To create Walked I estimate that I stitched together over 600 discarded packs. Here my visual vocabulary mirrors the repetition of mass production. They are attached end to end. Day after day I did this. It was a step-by-step journey in which a boring, repetitive task became more and more interesting. Each pack had a history. Its particular condition was a reference to the time in which it provided unit-dose medicine. I felt as though I was in a constant conversation with this past. It follows, then, that the installation I have made with the strips take exhibition viewers on a similar journey, a physical and metaphorical 'walk'. Along the way there are changes in expectation, and it is these kinds of changes that I want to put at the heart of my practice as an artist. Moving from everyday experiences to the values of art and aesthetics the work allows us to question what is actually 'there'. We are prompted to look at ordinary things more closely - provisionally, at least.