Pharmacakes, Perma-Ice™, plaster, pharmaceuticals, metal cupcake stand and other media, 2008

“Pharmacakes” was one of the sculptures that was later accepted for an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s International Gallery in 2010 called “Revealing Culture.”

I made this piece during the time that I was taking art classes at Tarrant County College Northeast in Hurst, Texas. I had reached the age, as most of us do, at which I had to begin taking several medications on a daily basis just to maintain good health; things like medicine to regulate blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. I was struck by the prevalence of drugs (prescription and over-the-counter, or OTC) in our culture – for every symptom, from the minor to the severe, we have a drug. If you voice any physical or emotional complaint, someone is quick to say, “Have you taken anything for that?” As a Mom, of course I never wanted my children to be in pain or even uncomfortable, but our culture’s reliance on a steady flow of pain relievers, decongestants, antihistamines, etc. sometimes worried me a little.

These thoughts led me to want to create a sculpture about our culture’s attitude towards medication. I filled regular aluminum baking cups with plaster to make little cupcakes and then tinted a product called Perma-Ice™ using acrylic paint and “iced” the cakes with it. Perma-Ice™ is a product used for display baked goods made by professionals and hobbyists. I decorated the cakes with various prescription and OTC drugs. A few interesting observations from the project:

• OTC drugs are much prettier than prescription drugs. I assume that’s probably because with prescription drugs there’s not much of a brand purchasing decision to be made by the consumer – they buy what their doctor tells them to buy. OTC drugs, however, can be marketed like any other consumer good to increase sales and market share.
• When students saw me working on this project up at the school, they started bringing me some of their leftover medications to use on the cupcakes, which was really helpful because it increased the variety of shapes and colors available to me. At the time, I didn’t concern myself with the names or uses of the medications – only their appearance. Later, though, when the piece was accepted for the “Revealing Culture” exhibition at The Smithsonian, the museum required me to provide them with a list of the names of every medication used in the piece. Their insurance company needed this information. I painstakingly examined every tablet and capsule for colors, lettering, codes, etc. and identified each one. As I did so, I realized that some of the medications the students had given me were for severe and/or troubling conditions. I was touched by the trust in me that their sharing of the knowledge revealed by the medications implied.
• When the piece was completed, it was displayed at TCC in a campus exhibition for a short time, with work by other students. The exhibition was in a small gallery with doors that were locked when the gallery was not open and supervised. Somehow, in spite of the precautions, one of the cupcakes disappeared. It was one of the prettiest ones – decorated with peach icing and capsules that were peach and gray. The capsules were one of the leftover medications a student had given me and I only had a few of them. When I researched the medication to try and recreate the cupcake, I learned that it was a powerful anti-depressant. I wondered about the motivation of the person who took the cupcake. Did they have a sentimental attachment to that medication or did they plan to pry the capsules off the cupcake for consumption? I’ll never know. Because the work had been accepted for the show at The Smithsonian, I needed to try and recreate that stolen cupcake so the piece would be complete. Since the capsules were a prescription drug, I didn’t have a way to obtain more that felt ethically right to me. Instead I bought empty peach and gray gelatin capsules and made dummy capsules.
• As time passed, this turned out to be one piece that was definitely not of archivable quality. The plaster and Perma-Ice™ held up well, not deteriorating at all, but the medications degraded badly, crumbling, dissolving, bleeding into the icing. If one is looking for visual metaphors, that could be interpreted in some interesting ways.