A Brief Tea Party

Sugar Tea Set with Icing Doily

For the first piece of my degree project I dug down into the feeling of sweet memories that we wish to revisit. But just like these memories I wanted my object to change each time it’s called upon. Through free sketching and writing associations in my journal I found that crystallization and sugar came up often as well as the images of tea sets and tea tables. I recalled what it was like to use my kiddie tea set when I was young, sitting in a chair with the table at my shoulders, sticking my pinky up as I sipped what was basically sugar water. I felt like an adult, I felt fancy. Now I wish I could go back to that feeling. Idealistic of what adulthood is, but still playful. The wonderment that is felt from make-believe.

I used sugar as the medium for this project to capture the temporal qualities of memories. The objects made out of sugar held great detail from the molds and were functional but only for a very short time. They became symbols of childhood and the tea parties we had and the wonderment and sweetness of an all sugar world. When working on this project multiple people brought up the scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where Willy Wonka drinks from a daffodil teacup and then bites it. I was so happy with this because I felt validated in my thought process. I realized that other people also notice what I do and that small moments we experience in our childhood stay with each of us. I am glad that many people had the same reaction to the scene as I did. It was such a magical idea of being able to drink from a cup and then sink your teeth into something that was previously porcelain.

The hardest part of this project was that I wanted to make something that would last for more than a few days. I wanted to have something left of each of my pieces, and come away with a full tea set. But with each batch I made, they would lose their shape and melt onto the table. I now realize that the losing of the objects and their melting just further captured a liminal moment. While we want to go back to a time in our lives where we believe such wonderment and stay in the sugar fantasy, it’s something that can be indulged in but not lived in. The objects ended up being very liminal because while they did exist in this world their reaction to it and changing qualities made it clear that their true lives were somewhere else. Somewhere we wanted to get to.