Helen Fuller chaT installation (detail) 2002
‘Tea´s a good drink. It´ll keep you going´, confides Agnes Coyle to her emotionally shattered nephew, in The Shipping News. And the advice is repeated later in this film, set in the US and Newfoundland.
Such a statement is not, of course, news for Australian audiences; we´ve always known this. Tea, over the past two centuries, has become the lifeblood of the nation. Boast we may about our astounding per capita level of alcohol consumption, but it´s tea that flows through our veins, drains and perhaps, our brains.
As a ‘shameless´* tea addict, my childhood, like that of so many other Australians, was awash with the pale brown milky (no sugar, thanks) fluid. Prior to colonisation by the latte lifestyle of chic boutique cafes, the entire nation stopped for a cuppa at least five times a day; in many parts, it still does. Whether taken in The Front Room, accompanied by clinking porcelain and tinkling teaspoons, sipped around humble kitchen tables or guzzled on worksites in chipped enamel mugs and creaking polystyrene, this beverage has assumed multiple roles—nutritional, social and emotional.
Beyond its efficacy in digesting tough meat and three veg, the Oz tea ritual has also functioned as a social lubricant, notably in the realm of women, who are well aware that anything can be achieved over a cup of tea. But it wasn´t always so convivial. In days gone by, formal afternoon teas occupied a site of domestic tyranny, sternly legislating class and status, intimidating small children, shaming inferior housekeeping and exposing inadequate ‘tea things´. To reach our family´s best china in the top kitchen cupboard, we had to stand on a chair, causing temporary panic if our posh relatives turned up unexpectedly to scoff Mum´s renowned biscuits.
Helen Fuller chaT installation (detail) 2002
The great Australian cuppa, derived largely from English habits, has also fulfilled a significant therapeutic role, in the land of the great unsaid, as sustainer of the national psyche. There was a time when ‘a cup of tea, a bex and a good lie down´ signified neither nostalgic clich nor musical comedy; this remedy had to substitute for what we now diagnose as post-natal depression, domestic violence and poverty. Therefore, at social occasions there have been few sights so reassuring as the sturdy urn, as at Mum´s funeral, made bearable by legions of her friends, CWA ladies, grieving for her biscuits and dispensing tea and sympathy with abandon.
Of late, the taking of tea has assumed an epicurean turn, revealing diverse culinary and cultural manifestations beyond Bushells, save-the-label-Lanchoo and Swan brand aluminium teapots. At last elevated to the rarefied realms of art and craft, Ritual of Tea at Adelaide´s JamFactory re-examines this trans-national beverage and its accoutrements (quipage) in all their glorious multiplicity. Curator, Janice Lally explains: ‘tea vessels offer infinite variety for expression of skilful design and the exercise of fine craftsmanship´ and demonstrates this concept in selecting work by 36 makers, as well as providing stimulating essays by Gay Bilson, Wendy Walker, Alison Main and herself, all of which delightfully amplify our historical and cultural understandings of tea´s gastronomic and ritual function.
The main gallery features ceramicists, jewellers and metal smiths, complemented—and almost gazumped by— Helen Fuller´s sculptural installation, ChaT, in Gallery 2. Thirty-five of the artists´ works/wares are utilitarian but highly formal in design and finish and redolent with associations of the ‘top cupboard´ and best tea sets. Bowls, jugs, cups, baskets, spoons, caddies, scoops, ladles, infusers, scoops, strainers, vessels, a tray, tea tags, of course, teapots—and even a ceramic house—provide a gamut of culturally diverse rituals and materials. From Neville Assad-Salha´s nostalgic contemplations of tea and women´s business in Lebanon and Jaishree Srinivasan´s ‘smashable´ terracotta cups to Elizabeth Fotiadis´ elegant tea strainers (whose perforations spell out ‘green tea´, ‘black tea´ and ‘weak tea´), Patsy Hely´s ‘restorative´ mix´n match´d, found-and-formed tea set and Jane Bowden´s shrimp-like woven tea strainers, artists´ responses are various, and often affectionate. Many are wondrously evocative of tea´s capacity to soothe and revive, as evidenced by Kirsten Coelho´s black and celadon tea set and Angela Valamanesh´s vessels of exquisitely subtle ‘blends´, conjuring up an aromatic spectrum of association.
But it was Fuller´s old, cracked, chipped and dreary Johnson cups, complete with their muddy high tide marks, that deeply unsettled me, along with other domestic tea-making paraphernalia (billies, thermoses, aluminium teapots and dirt), dumped like so much archaeological detritus in the back gallery. These forlorn remnants of domestic routine, together with two groups of marshalled family photos—females down one side: males down the other—infused complex layers of meaning throughout this ‘budget blend´ section of the exhibition. But it´s not just nostalgia we experience, since this artist´s strong brew submerges irony and sentimentality well beneath a ‘barbed affection´** towards her austere, working class ‘50s childhood, peopled by a ‘bunch of wowsers´ and ‘Methodist tea-totallers´. Regimented picnic sets, tea spout frills, stained aluminium and nasty plastic vessels create an uneasy dialogue with obsessionally crisp white half-finished shirts, suspended on high, perhaps forever.
And, sadly, it has all passed by, this relentless domestic labour of washing and worrying, punctuated by boiling and pouring and chatting—now transformed somehow into worthless chattels. Mere stuff is all that´s left. These vulnerable family rituals, poignantly stained and strained, are distilled by the artist within a particularly memorable and haunting image, and yet one which might easily pass unnoticed. Two tiny toy figures (male and female), and less than 1cm high, sit on a shelf, beside the looming dimensions of a very ordinary teacup. When I looked again, similar tiny figures were in fact detectable throughout the installation, a very little male being perched on the rim of another cup.
Helen Fuller chaT installation (detail) 2002
Dwarfed by the surreal enormity of scale, the human ciphers offer a Zen reading of the vernacular tea ceremony, a cross-cultural reference—and one that is not entirely inappropriate. Fuller´s marriage to a Chinese artist some years ago subsequently created an introduction to ‘the higher art of drinking green tea´.
For all the beauty, variety and subtlety of makers´ responses to this imaginative and accessible exhibition, we are finally confronted with the question of what remains when the ceramics crack, when the metal tarnishes with age and use. Tea alone, it seems, and the conviviality and consolation it engenders will keep us going, regardless of aesthetics, craft and culture—or perhaps even coffee. Speaking of which, I have to go; the kettle´s boiling …
* From Samuel Johnson´s phrase, ‘a hardened and shameless tea drinker´, quoted by Valamanesh, A., Ritual of Tea, 2002, p.18.
** Main, A. ‘Tip me over, and pour me out´, Ritual of Tea, 2002, p. 12.
