Tea for Thought at Tate Modern

Tea for Thought by Davina Drummond and Nadine Jarvis
Once More with Feeling
curated by Oriana Fox

27th June 2009
Tate Modern

Text from Once More with Feeling publication:

‘Would everybody please give us an example from their own life on how they experience feminism? We need to hear it to raise our own consciousness.’

As two young women, we are struck by the wide-ranging conceptions of feminism we encounter in our daily lives through discussion, the media, academia and art. We wish to open the debate up and bring it back to its feminist roots by sharing individual experiences within an open forum. Echoing Suzanne Lacy’s notion that ‘connection, community, and kinship are feminist words’ we plan to set up a temporary meeting point on the Tate Green and provide Tea for Thought so that visitors can share and capture conversations.

Over a cup of tea, members of the public will discuss their answers to the question ‘what does feminism mean to you today?’ Visitors will be invited to record their thoughts on blank rosettes, each one a political statement in its own right. In the evening the rosettes will be presented in the corridor by the East room inside the Tate creating an archive of contemporary opinion. Wearing a rosette is recognised as symbol of party opinion and the belonging to a set of shared beliefs. In Tea for Thought the rosette will be used as a tool for encourage personal thoughts, ideas, questions and experiences… and will not belong to the individual badge wearer but instead belong to a collection of individual ideas.

This project is informed by 1970’s-style consciousness raising sessions and by the work of two British artists who worked collaboratively in the 1980s, namely Shirley Cameron and Evelyn Silver. Their fondness for tea sharing and their commitment to participatory public performances have inspired our work. Initially we considered re-enacting Two Women Build a Wall (1983) in which the artists built a brick wall with bricks and cement in a public park. During short breaks from the building process, Cameron and Silver invited passers by to participate in the work through discussion over a cup of tea. One artist wore a very feminine dress and the other wore overalls. They had pitched a tent nearby and inside it hung a temporary archive displaying images of women’s clothing. We felt that the work’s overt way of addressing the issue of gendered dress codes wouldn’t work today, but we were drawn to the idea of a temporary public archive – like a barometer of current opinion.

Using public, non art spaces is integral to our practice and we indentify with Cameron’s stated aims “… to be paid for my work yet manage to work outside the mainstream art world system, to work in truly public spaces, in an accessible way. [She] envisaged an area between community art and fine art as a growing one.”3 Her commitment to bridging the gap between museum based work and community art bears a close resonance to our practice - our work would not be possible without community; in this incidence it would merely be a bunch of blank rosettes, undrunk tea and unread research.

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