Tracing Tea: A Story of Movement, Memory, and Empire
This project reflects on historic and traditional routes of trade and migration through the lens of tea - a substance both ordinary and deeply symbolic. While tea is often associated with comfort and ritual across cultures, it also bears the heavy weight of a global history shaped by colonisation, commerce, and displacement.
Through a series of photographs, the work explores the invisible intersections between tea, trade routes, colonialism, capitalism, migration, and identity. Each image marks a moment on this complex journey: from the courts of Chinese dynasties to Indian plantations, from Ottoman cafés to English drawing rooms. Tea, in this context, transcends its role as a beverage to become a vessel of adaptation and survival.
The cups of tea depicted are not merely aesthetic objects; they are silent witnesses. Embedded within them are the stories of the hands that harvested the leaves, the ships that crossed oceans, the empires that rose and fell. Cracks in porcelain become metaphors for fractured histories and diasporic identities. Loose leaves scattered at the edges evoke a sense of the uprooted - what has been carried, traded, and lost.
By tracing these quiet threads of trade and transformation, the project invites viewers to reconsider the ordinary. A simple cup of tea becomes a powerful archive -a site where the personal meets the political, where the everyday ritual reveals the weight of global histories and the resilience of migration.