The Root of My Negativi{tea}, 2025
Mixed media artist book
21 cm x 32 cm x 29 cm
Artist’s Statement
The Root of My Negativi{tea} is an artist’s book that holds the weight of inherited pain between mother and daughter in an intimate and domestic form – tea. The artwork names what is inherited alongside warmth and love: the negative{tea} – a heavy burdening residue at the root of it all, a sediment that does not dissolve.
Three concertina-folded chapters unfold from the protective petal-like casing of three abalone shells, held close with fragile tea-stained lace. The shells function as a vessel and an enclosure of a psychic space seeped with the mind’s negativity. To access this vulnerable interior, the viewer must handle the artwork, opening each shell carefully and intentionally before peeling back each concertina fold in a way that mirrors one’s processing of inherited trauma: non-linear, slow, and revealed only through direct attention.
The pages incorporate paper handmade from veldt grass alongside commercial surfaces which are infused with scavenged materials and mixed media illustrations, many of which are quite literally steeped in tea. Throughout the book, the South African veldt embodies the vastness of unresolved emotions attached to maternal trauma that seep beyond the domestic space from which it originates. Against this setting, a wingless fairy creature moves, embodying a liminal psychological state between the child who has absorbed maternal trauma without understanding it and the adult who now reflects on and moves through life with the burden of its aftereffects.
Image Gallery
