What Remains (2025)
Tea Time Stories
In my work, tea becomes both material and metaphor: a ritual of pause, a moment between doing and being, a slow act of transformation.
In this stillness, conversation, reflection, and memory steep together. The humble teabag, once discarded, becomes a vessel of what remains: traces of time, touch, and transformation.
By reusing teabags in my work, I honour their fragility and history, each one a fragment of daily ritual, a marker of presence. Their stains and folds record unseen gestures, the passage of hands and heat, of gathering and solitude. Within these remnants, memory becomes material; the ordinary becomes sacred.
My work unfolds through series, some in small constellations of pieces that echo one another in rhythm and tone. Some exist in trios, quiet dialogues of three, others expand into 3 x 3 grids of nine, or into larger compositions of 81 (9 x 9), each reflecting the cyclical patterns found in nature and ritual.
The number three and nine hold deep personal and symbolic significance in my work. I was born on 3 March 1983 - a date shaped entirely by threes, and my life path number is nine. The number three represent the rhythm of existence: birth, life and death, past present, future, body mind and spirit. In many traditions, three is a sacred number - the point where duality finds harmony.
Nine, as a multiple of three, feels like a completion of these cycles, a return, a full circle.
These numbers guide the structure of my series, reflecting the patterns of renewal and transformation that runs through my practice.
The 9 x 9 grid, forming 81, reflects the rhythm of cycles, a structure of completion and return. In many philosophies, nine represents wholeness and spiritual fulfillment, while its repetition deepens this sense of harmony. The number 81 echoes the 81 verses of the Tao Te Ching, a text that, like my work, contemplates balance, impermanence, and transformation.
The work of 81 teabag doilies, each fragment becomes a breath, each intersection a memory. The pattern becomes a meditation, a map, and daily devotions, like a quiet geometry of remembering.
Together, these works ask what endures when everything else falls away - what remains when the making is done, and only traces are left to tell the story.
Using a circular motif highlights the cyclical nature of life and the interconnectedness of all living things.
The artworks draw upon the rhythm of time, the turning of days, the passage from dawn to dusk, echoing how beginnings and endings are part of the same continuum.
The process of Cyanotype itself becomes a metaphor: sunlight transform the surface, leaving behind a trace of what once present. This light, much like memory, marks and fades, yet its impression endures.
By incorporating these elements of time, the movement of the sun, the change of seasons, the quiet pulse of growth and decay, the works reflect the cyclical nature of existence. Through these themes, viewers are invited to consider their own connection to nature, and how their lives, too, form part of the larger cycles of renewal and return.
