About the artwork

The teahouse sits in a tree, on a cliff overlooking a village. One visitor at a time is brought to the teahouse and served tea (matcha, made from powdered green tea). The tea bowls used in the ceremony were handmade by the villagers. I stayed in the village for a year and went one by one to the villagers’ homes to ask them to make the tea bowls. Each has a question from its maker at the bottom. “What does a child mean to you?” “What does destiny mean to you?” “What does your family mean to you?” After drinking up the tea, the guest writes an answer to the question. The answers were returned along with the bowl to its maker. My goal was to discover each individual’s human drama through talking with as many people as possible and making these “questions” together, as we worked together for a year crafting these tea bowls. I wanted visitors to this place to know that here are people with many different histories. (Open Competition Winning Work)