Text project again

Next week sees the part-timers' crit for the text project, started so long ago, and based on the "Medicine Man" collection at the Wellcome Institute. I did the first part right away, and have been revisiting part 2 (conceptual body books, so-called) for some time. However on re-reading the brief, I'm less sure than ever... "Choose an object that suggests a potential book form" - the filigree case containing the Goa stone ... like this one in the Museum of London -

But I'm more interested in the stone itself - antidote, cure-all, preventative, panacea - perhaps even placebo. The brief goes on: "Consider the book as a container of information ... and produce a text that could be stored in this form" (eg, boxes, bottles, hinged objects, receptacles, jars). "Try to incorporate found material from your research into your text... combining words and phrases from your found material alongside and within your own text."

Some of my ideas for the potential book(ish...) form are round books; nests for the pills (made of paper string), in their special boxes, and also a string with words spun into it, to be knitted into a talismanic garment (this string, and the garment, is "just a thought" so far).

As ideas develop ... lately my focus has been on "a panacea for the ills of society" - in other words, money. The Goa stones changed hands for huge amounts of money, because they were believed in absolutely (and perhaps because they were prestigious as well as precious, hence the filigree cases they were kept in). They often changed hands for ten times their weight in gold ... which brings us to the bottom line: money, the cure for all evils, the modern panacea, the way to fix anything and everything, even all the social ills - ?

After making a loooong list of possible social ills (despair, poverty, debt, greed, anger, exclusion, etc etc etc) I made a medieval-looking purse to put "misery money" into. (The "money" was made of lead curtain weights - lead being a base metal and satisfyingly heavy; and that's actual Red Tape used for the strings.)

"How is this a book" asked my son. Uh ... it opens and closes?? Oh yes ... it's called the Text Project... where is the text in all this?

Not quite there yet.