Stavanger, Norway
Being offered a cup of tea is a common comfort of life on so many parts of our planet. It can happen to you in Japan, India, Norway, Turkey, England, even the United States. You can do it for yourself or for another. Yet it depends on the availability of fresh water, of colonial and post-colonial trade networks, of climate-sensitive crop growing, and so much more that is invisible while we drink a cuppa. In her 2024 installation “Waterfall, quiet streams,” Evy Horpestad Tjaland arranges 3000 used tea bags into a configuration whose simplicity belies its sensorial and associative affect. Tea bags strung into a chain cascade from the roof of the gallery down a corner and onto the floor, where they spill out into an undulating pool of individual bags. The waterfall structure evokes the necessity of clean water; the tags of the intertwined bags acknowledge international commerce; the sea of little brown bags, tags removed and strings askew, teems like the masses of people involved in tea production from planting to sipping and everything in between. Up close, the sight and scent is unexpectedly touching, a reminder of the tea bags my grandmother would save by the side of the sink, to be reused because it was wrong to waste, an instinct even more relevant today.
—Lori Waxman March 16, 1:27 PM