Spinning yarns on science

Opened this month at the Royal College of General Practitioners' HQ on Euston Road, What Once Was Imagined is a show by Susie Freeman and Dr Liz Lee (curated by Mary la Trobe Bateman) that presents 20 years of collaboration between the pair. As Pharmacopoeia, the pair investigate disease, medical history and how drugs intersect with culture and society – all through tactile and often pattern-filled creations.

What Once Was Imagined features 31 pieces created by Pharmacopoeia, that each reference medical practice, some relating to specific patients. Jubilee, for example, is a wedding dress made from the quantity of contraceptive pills a woman will take during her married life, whereas Steve’s Scarf, is made from heart disease, arthritis and diabetes medications prescribed by Dr Lee to her patient Steve to manage his overlapping conditions.

Susie first got into textiles after her brother Tom brought a trunk full of ikat clothes home from Guatemala, and trained as a weaver at Manchester School of Art. The abundance of yarns and freedom to play with dyeing gave her the materials to experiment with woven structures and she often used the leftovers for quick knits on domestic knitting machines. Later at the Royal College of Art, she began to find with ways to trap sparkly things between layers, in order to imitate the sheen of complex cloths.

We were first tipped off to Susie and Liz’s inspiring work by former Zetteler PR assistant India Ayles, who is now off to pursue her own creative endeavours across the pond. So before she packed her bags for New York City, we sent India to quiz Susie about her work and get the lowdown on upcoming show What Once Was Imagined...

“My activity as an artist can be described as that of trapping tiny objects in a delicate web of filament.” This is a very unique way of constructing textile pieces, how did you develop this technique?

My mum’s sewing box and bead swapping at school started an obsession with shiny things and haberdashery. Peggotty taught me to french knit on a cotton reel, sew by hand and make myself clothes on her Singer. When I left home I bought a Bernina sewing machine which I still use for work and pleasure. With the pocketing technique I tried trapping snippets of ribbon, feathers, torn papers, pearls and miracle fish. As I became more proficient in working with three-dimensional tiny things my collecting became more of a job than a hobby, particularly with found and free objects from the beach or the bin.

What first drew you to collecting pills, pill packets and other miscellaneous objects?

Using pills in the pockets came about from a Cornish holiday conversation about contraception with a childhood friend GP Liz Lee. As I sat nursing my third baby we talked of IUD coils, vasectomy, condoms and caps. Suddenly an irresistible idea formed for us to make a young woman’s cocktail dress from colourful contraceptive pills sparkling like sequins and exhibit it encircled by IUCDs in glass boxes like standing stones or 'wise women’.

Pharmacopoeia is the name which Dr Liz Lee and you take on when you work together on large-scale commissions. Did you ever imagine to be bridging the gap between art and science when you began your career at the RCA?

As we entered our forties, comfortably experienced in our respective careers, I think we were both seeking something new. Liz had published a book with Open University Press about death and dying and was looking for a lighter topic to explore and I was hankering after something more intellectually stimulating than the decorative craftwork I was producing. From that first talk about fertility, medical art ideas developed quickly through frequent calls and letters about our personal health experiences and that of our families. Liz gave me a British National Formulary book to study. One of her tools of the trade, the BNF is a kind of modern Materia Medica describing drugs, chemicals and preparations used in medicine. It’s also known as a Pharmacopoeia, we chose that as our collaborative title.    

Tell us about the story behind your piece Cradle to Grave, commissioned by The British Museum...

In 2002 artist Dave Critchley, Liz and I were commissioned by Dr Henrietta Lidchi at the British Museum to make a piece of art that explored society's relationship with Western medicine. Our initial research focused on national prescribing statistics and morbidity and mortality data. We started with death and worked backwards, ascertaining thee prescription totals issued for different medicines in a year. This enabled us to calculate the average number of pills each one of us might take during our lifetime – approximately 14,000 pills.

Having studied the data we were able to imaginatively invent a disease narrative of ‘everywoman’ and ‘everyman’. We considered the childhood illnesses, their teenage and young adult years, and so on. Even this simple, apparently prosaic process was revealing. For example the medical burden of menstruation, fertility and pregnancy meant that by the age of 40, every woman has taken more than twice as many pills as everyman. During their reproductive years women experience far more illness than men and are four times more likely to visit a doctor. Later, however this balance is redressed when everyman develops hypertension and starts to take a tablet every day. Further on, he has a heart attack and dies of a stroke aged 76, while every woman continues with treatment for arthritis and diabetes into her early eighties.

How did you go about making the project more human?

The project contextualised the raw medical and pharmacological detail by including two other narrative strands. Running on either side of the pill diaries are personal objects, documents and medical artefacts that relate to daily life. Interspersed between these are groups of photographs with captions written by their owners, tracing typical moments in real lives. We invited a wide spectrum of people to submit photographs that they felt particularly illustrated their own personal experience of health and ill-health. The response we got demonstrated very clearly that maintaining a sense of wellbeing is much more complex than just treating periods of illness. Among other things the photos reveal that it is about family and community, work, weddings and funerals. It is about eating and drinking and smoking and dancing. It is about our relationship with nature. It includes sadness and suffering and loss.

Your work has graced numerous public collections – Victoria & Albert Museum, The British Museum and the Wellcome Trust – what through your eyes has been its most important cultural home?

Without a doubt The British Museum. Cradle to Grave is the artwork I am most proud of and delighted it is still there for all to see for free, 15 years on from when I knitted those two giant lengths of pill cloth.

With a dramatic increase in the global consumption of pills, has your work taken on a new meaning since you began?

I believe it has. The volume of prescribed medication has expanded enormously and a critical reading of UK prescription statistics suggests that our current medical structure is near breaking point. An increasingly strong medical voice challenges assumptions that underpin prescribing guidelines. Individual risk and population benefit need to be carefully weighed, which is particularly difficult in the context of multi-morbidity. For example NNT: Number Needed to Treat, derived from population level epidemiological studies, is rarely presented to patients as part of a shared decision making process. Complex multi-system and multiple prescribing is especially problematic for older people. Those working in the field of elderly medicine are currently discussing ways to rationalise and reduce prescribing to safe and sustainable levels. To encourage both doctors and patients to engage in the debate this year, Pharmacopoeia has been making new installations for a touring exhibition introducing the concepts of NNT and risks associated with polypharmacy.

Can you tell us a little bit about your up-and-coming exhibition at the Royal College of GPs?

What Once Was Imagined, curated by Mary la Trobe Bateman opens at the Royal College of General Practitioners' HQ on Euston Road in late November. The exhibition celebrates 20 years of Pharmacopoeia, juxtaposing favourite pieces with new works about developments in medicine that could once only be imagined. A version of our Brazilian botanical artwork WOWI will sit alongside Bristol Silver, constructed from hundreds of empty pill packets for the management of common chronic diseases sourced from a specific community via the pharmacy dosette box system.