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TEA

photo of domestic interior mounted on road barrier TEA is a collaborative team of artists working within an expanded notion of public art. They aspire to a 'Critical Spatial Practice' that explores and represents places in ways that challenge the familiar or taken for granted. Places don't have one fixed identity. Not only do they change over time but use, experience and memory identify them in different ways depending on a person's relationship to them: familiar, personally significant, public, official, economic, brief, sustained. The making visible of relationships between people and places reveals the "Immaterial Architecture of Place" (Doreen Massey).

As artists, TEA enter this rich arena and for a time become part of its complex identity: "Every time we enter a new place we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity which is really all that 'local' places consist of." (Lucy Lippard.) Their creative processes of engagement structure a temporary identity of the place by bringing into juxtaposition different spatial and temporal narratives within the built environment.

TEA's performative exploration of particular places resonates with broader current issues and with the work of other disciplines that are searching for ways of thinking about places that encompass contemporary experience. Audiences engage with the artists' processes at all stages of the evolution of a project.

Recent Exhibitions and Projects:

  • 2004 Boat Trip: Nothing But Flowers - book and DVD. An encounter with the Manchester Ship Canal including visual sequences from different perspectives alongside boat passangers stories and commissioned writings.
  • 2003 Boat Trip: Nothing But Flowers - Live event. Public boat trips during August and September along the upper reaches of Manchester Ship Canal accompanied by live and pre-recorded video, local voices and live commentary. Commissioned by The Lowry.
  • 2003 Prospekt Working with local artists on the streets of St Petersburg as part of Manchester Week. Presented in St Petersburg and at Urbis.
  • 2002 Exchanges  Manchester: St Petersburg Mixed media research installation at CUBE, Manchester bringing together different ways of representing and cross-referencing opinions old industrial buildings in Manchester and St Petersburg.
  • 2002 Fabrika Residency and installation at the constructivist designed, just still producing Red Banner knitwear Factory in St Petersburg as part of the emplacements project.
  • 2000 City Mapping: Hull Two live views over the city from roof-top cameras aligned with the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; recorded journeys following these sightlines as closely as the built environment allowed; life and times (past, present and future) in the city described by people who live or work where the sight lines and the journeys coincided.
  • 2000 The Cut Six hour video installation of the landscapes and places passed on a boat journey on the Leeds and Liverpool canal between Blackburn and Barnoldswick. Presented at the Mid-Pennine Art Gallery, Burnley, Lancashire and at the Platform Gallery, Vasa, Finland, April 2005.

Further Information:

Email: Tea@ukonline.co.uk