“I Can’t Help The Way I Feel” by John Isaacs The exhibition I chose is called “Medicine Now” which is being exhibited in Wellcome Collection. The exhibition is mainly demonstrating views of various artists and scientists about current common topics like obesity, genetics and how they describe the defects uniquely either with scientific explanations using video installations or creating huge objects and relating them to more abstract terms such as emotions and feelings.

I think the most interesting piece in the entire exhibition was the one John Isaacs did, “I Can’t Help The Way I Feel”. The object is made from wax, polystyrene, steel and expanding foam, which are all covered in oil painting. The shape is to be considered as a human body with no head and arms but a fat giant torso, fat belly parts, and some parts that I can’t name which are coming out of the body in huge proportions. The size of the structure is enormous so that is the first thing you notice when you enter the room. The basic thing that comes up to mind is that this object is about obesity, and it is also referring to malaria. There are some defected skin areas on the back of the structure and also on the legs. If the object was just about obesity and malaria, I think it would be too obvious. But as I expected, the idea of all the sagging parts reflects also an abstract meaning. Isaacs wanted to describe how life sometimes feels so overwhelming. I think, he wanted to show what is also going on inside our body, in our mind basically. He wanted to show about our internal, unseen parts by using our external part; skin. He made the skin tissue unusually swollen, to say how much our feelings and our over thinking about stuff restrain us from doing what we actually want, and in the end, how they turn into something heavy –psychologically that starts to make us unhealthy. I think this is the part