Handcrafted Auguries deals with my evolving themes of ritual, tradition, and inheritance, as they blend with nature and science. I find equal wonder in the traditional “women’s work” activities of baking and cooking as I do in studying geography, astronomy and biology. These images are created to express the wonder I see in the every day; the lurking sense of order and sacredness that imbues even the most mundane of objects. I strive to cross-breed the spiritual and the analytical, rather than separate them into two separate languages.

Printing images onto teabags satisfies my personal conceptual concerns of working with a material that holds significance to
me – the ritual of morning tea that I have observed since I was a child. I drink from every tea bag that is used, dry it, empty it, and digitally print a portion of the image onto it. Much like my training in traditional darkroom photography, the image is “developed”, in this case by hand, as I paint highlights, shadows and color into the image with watercolor crayon and pencil. The dried stains of the tea bag remain and are integrated, layers of visual texture are created, and the passage of time is implied.