Artist Colleen Wolstenholme transforms pharmaceuticals like ValiumÆ, XanaxÆ, and PaxilÆ by carving them out of plaster on a scale large enough to make them look like giant toy blocks or other-worldly pods. She also casts pills and fashions them into silver jewellery. By putting pills in strange places, by taking them out into the open, she makes us look at them anew.

Wolstenholme is concerned with psychoactive pills - the kind of pills that focus the attention of hyperactive children, help the clinically depressed get out of bed, or dull the pain of cancer. They are pills that some people get hooked on. They are great "numbing normalizers" that psychiatric "consumer-survivors" fight against being forced to take. They are also prescribed to women at almost twice the rate as they are to men. In short, their significance extends beyond the description of their pharmacodynamic action, beyond what they do silently and invisibly within the body. They have become cultural icons, the site of political battles, the source of extreme pleasure and absolute need.

By working with the wares of pharmacology Wolstenholme occupies a space held almost exclusively by an expert culture of physicians, psychiatrists, pharmacists, pharmacologists, and pharmaceutical consumers. It is a culture of initiates, of those who have the knowledge or the need. Yet Wolstenholme does not displace those experts or distance herself from that culture. Rather, by defying the rules, by making her pills available to anyone who encounters her work, she allows us to participate in expert discourse. Seeing her pills in a gallery, or dangling from someone's neck, we start to ask what Paxil does (it is an anti-depressant), or who takes SeraxÆ (people who suffer from anxiety disorders). She does not answer these kinds of questions herself, but her work, by virtue of its very visibility, opens up a space where questions can at least be asked.

Wolstenholme has manipulated pills for our pleasure and contemplation without once telling us what they are for, or under what circumstances they are to be taken. The rules that surround pills are normally very clear. We are not supposed to do anything with them that is not on the label. And then, we are not to do anything with them but take the prescribed dose from the bottle - fastened with a child-proof cap, noiseless under cotton batten - and put them safely away when we're done. Wolstenholme subverts the normal relationship we have with pills: we do not necessarily encounter them from the perspective of a particular diagnosis. Freed from their implied movement from illness to wellness, we can simply look at them, not only as the tools of the pharmaceutical trade but as aesthetically interesting objects, as icons, as the foci of arguments about illness and health.

The shape and look of pills are the intellectual property of those who manufacture them. Therefore, by reproducing their likeness, Wolstenholme has violated trademarks held by some of the largest companies in the world. While it is difficult to know what the pharmaceutical companies think of her work, there is no question what the lawyers who act on their behalf think. Lawyers representing Pharmacia & Upjohn, for example, have threatened to take legal action because Wolstenholme sells jewellery that just happens to look exactly like their client's products.

In taking action against Wolstenholme (make no mistake, threatening legal action is action) pharmaceutical companies are guarding against the possibility of their products being confused with her work. But what exactly are they guarding against? Neither they nor anyone else believes consumers could mistake a dose of Paxil with a silver ring that looks just like it, or with one of Wolstenholme's three-foot-long sculptures. The companies are guarding against any possibility of anyone considering the one when engaged with the other - whether they are viewing a sculpture, gazing at a ring, or looking for the toothpaste in grandma's medicine cabinet and coming across a bottle of medication. It is that pharmaceutical companies want themselves and their products to remain outside of public conversation. Any risk of confusing their products with anything else could potentially lead beyond the tightly-controlled and concealed marketing of drugs.

Wolstenholme's focus on the design of pills does not make their action as medication irrelevant. What she does is allow for more than just experts to talk about pills. Pharmacopoeia, the title Wolstenholme used for her pill sculpture installation shown recently at Hamilton Artists Inc., is also the name that is given to any authoritative book that provides information about the precise formulations of drugs. By borrowing that name she is denying that only experts in medicine or pharmacy can or should authoritatively talk about pills.

When Rob McGregor of the University of Toronto's department of pharmaceutical sciences was asked why medications are made to be so very pleasing to the eye, his answer was that design considerations address such issues as the possibility of confusing one medication for another. Drugs are designed to make the administration of medication as easy and as untraumatic as possible.

Aside from encouraging compliance from the patient, which is key to successfully treating many patients with pharmacotherapies, pills need to be designed so that they are not only easy to swallow, but also not intimidating or otherwise repulsive. As McGregor puts it, "drugs are really nothing but really expensive food ...." In other words, if a pill does not look good, no one will want to eat it. That is the reason why there are no black or red pills on the market.

Focusing on the look of pills also begs a hard question: Could the design of a medication, the attractiveness of it, contribute to what is termed "dependence liability" - the risk that people who are prescribed psychoactive drugs will become dependent on them. Generally, it is the action of the medications that is pointed to when dependence is being considered. Yet the emphasis in Wolstenholme's work on their design leads to the question of whether those taking a medication begin to identify with the look or feel of their pills. Her work suggests that such an identification could contribute to the complex issue of dependence. Perhaps when we see a pill we begin to anticipate how it is going to make us feel. Because it will make us feel good we may want it all the more. When this hypothesis is suggested to pharmacists and researchers, the response is usually sincere interest. The fact is though, no one has looked into whether the design of a pill could be a factor in its dependence liability.

Wolstenholme's work could not come close to answering such a question. The point is that her work has led to the question being posed. It is not being asked by those within the expert culture. Pharmaceutical companies don't ask because there is no possibility of profiting from an answer. Physicians who prescribe the drugs simply write the scripts. Pharmacists, while they are responsible for identifying the medications that they handle, fill hundreds of prescriptions a week. When they handle medications, they do so in groups of ten, or fifty, or 100, in tightly controlled surroundings. They are not paid to look at the drugs, to actually engage with them, to contemplate their form. Essentially, the design is just for the consumer.