The artists Susie Freeman and David Critchley and doctor Liz Lee give new meaning to the phrase “body of work.” Over the years, the British trio has collaborated on art that riffs on how we respond to medical issues, armed with a dispensary of drugs to boost our sense of wellness. Calling themselves Pharmacopoeia, they incorporate pills and their packaging into fabric by a process known as “pocket knitting,” creating objects and installations that seem to beg the question: In the overmedicated world we live in, have we created landscapes of healing — or of harm? Their creations conjure up a worrying world, one that synthesizes and then explodes the idea of treatment, cure, and well-being.
OTC Veil
The first collaboration by Freeman and Lee is a not-so-veiled commentary about “political prescribing,” or how women were given sedatives because it afforded society an easy way of dealing with poverty and domestic violence.
