Fluoxetine, a.k.a. Prozac. Names that mean different things to different people.

To some, it turns sad, worried, but otherwise normal people into zombies and/or drug addicts incapable of functioning without their daily fix.

To others, Fluoxetine and its use is a monument to individual weakness; an inability to cope with life.

If you were to ask more people still, you might be told that it might help restore some degree of order to a completely fragmented psyche. A chance at a new beginning.

The stark packets with those names on them say all of the above without meaning to.

They say something about the person that has them.

More is found on the information sheets that are within each packet, alongside the capsules which it’s extremely likely that you, or someone who you know or love, will be all too familiar with.

I certainly am.

The motivation for this piece was to give an artistic spin on long term medication use, the idea having first come to me after an initial course of antidepressants back in 2009, which allowed me to feel something close to “normal.”

After that, I collected each pack of Fluoxetine I had been prescribed, with a view to turning my consumption of the pills within into something else.

The idea was to make some sort of order out of the past few years. To bring the viewer closer to a drug that has been, and continues to be a key part of my experience of life.

A time-lapse video made from footage of the shoot can be found here.