Society summary

Museum to mount art exhibition

From Friday 12 October, the museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society is to mount a 12-week exhibition of contemporary art inspired by its collections. Entitled “Secret remedies”, the exhibition will be the first ever showing of contemporary art in the museum’s display spaces.

The works on display will be by British-born artist Michelle Charles, giving her first show in the United Kingdom for two decades. She has recently returned to live and work in London after an 18-year career exhibiting and teaching in New York.

Much of Michelle Charles’s work has focused on images of every day objects and their inherent relationship to the human body. Since 1998 one of her sources has been objects and ideas found among the collections of the Society’s museum — the reason she has chosen the museum as the venue for her show.

The exhibition features multiple painted and photogram images of medicine bottles, some with lingering traces of their contents. The photograms have been produced by projecting light through bottles placed in direct contact with photochemical paper.

One piece, “Secret remedies #2”, consists of 18 paintings in oils made on discarded library textbooks (not from the Society’s library but donated to the artist by a library at New York University). The title of this work, and of the exhibition itself, is taken from one such book — a 1909 listing revealing the “secret” ingredients of hundreds of brand name medicines.

Other works are from a series entitled “Lydia Pinkham Cure All” and refer to Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, “a positive cure for all those painful complaints and weaknesses common to our best female population”, which was marketed by Mrs Pinkham in the US in 1873 and still available as late as 1978.

Caroline Reed, the museum’s curator, said: “Michelle Charles’s work has a direct relevance to the museum’s rich historical collections and our joint aim with the artist is to bring both her work and the museum’s own resources to the attention of a completely new local and London-wide audience.”

“Secret remedies” will run until Friday 4 January. The museum is open between 9.30am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. Admission is free, but pre-booking is advised.

On Saturday 17 November at 2.30pm Michelle Charles will give an illustrated public lecture and lead a discussion on how some of the pieces seen in the exhibition were made. Admission will be £4 (concessions £2.50) and pre-booking is advised. During the exhibition she will also run two educational workshops designed for secondary school and sixth form pupils. Full details of all these events, which are supported by the Wellcome Trust, can be obtained from the museum office on 020 7572 2210.

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