Orchid as Pharmakon

Lucie Briand is a French visual artist based in Brussels. Her research draws on concepts such as intimacy and social norms, exploring issues related to the body, health, and collective memory. The personal and collective bodily narratives she stages seek to make invisible experiences visible.

Her practice takes a transdisciplinary approach, combining sculpture and performance through interactive installations. Her recurring use of liquids symbolizes processes of healing and resilience as a form of resistance to structures of domination, such as the medical environment.

Orchid as Pharmakon is a material and textile-based research project that explores the relationship between flexibility and rigidity, using fabric as a medium that can be transformed. The project builds on research into the iconography of pharmacy, and more specifically the Cup of Hygieia, a symbol associated with pharmacy and medicine. I am drawn to this figure for what it evokes: a container, a body that receives, but also a space of transformation and change through medicine.

The presence of plants in this iconography also invites reflection on knowledge related to medicinal plants and on the various ways of caring for the body. The term “pharmakon,” which can refer to both a remedy and a poison, introduces this ambivalence: a substance can transform, heal, or alter.