Last week, I gave a short talk about my current tea set work at a monthly meeting at the library called Artist Office, which gives artists the chance to use the library as a workspace and creates opportunities to exchange and discuss ideas. I took the opportunity to speak about the work while it’s still in progress, and to reflect on what could still be improved or added.
I began by talking about social sculpture as both a starting point and a space for ideas. From there, I spoke about my research through clay, drawing, site visits and storylines connected to colonial history.
Presenting my work to others benefited me. It helped me practise communicating my ideas and explaining my work more clearly. I also received useful feedback, especially when someone shared a link to The Common Salt performance with me, which I appreciated very much.
That evening, I watched the video. The work felt deeply connected to my work. The performance was provocative, beautiful, simple, and creative in the way it explored the history of British colonialism in India.
What I especially loved was how, within one hour, the artists managed to communicate their ideas so clearly and powerfully. By the end of the performance, the table itself had transformed into an assemblage sculpture. It reminded me that art can tell similar stories through many different forms and materials.
The next day, I designed the final small pot in my tea set. Before that, I was unsure of its purpose. But after watching the performance, I understood: it’s for salt!
The bone-dry teapot and cups still waiting, as if holding a story yet to be told. The tea set idea emerged from the story of a Yemeni translator, Omar Bahabri, which led me to delve deeper into the history of beverages, particularly tea. I was already familiar with the history of coffee, its origins in Ethiopia, its early cultivation and consumption in Yemen, and its spread along pilgrimage routes to Mecca, then through Muslim traders to Turkey, and onward to Italy and the rest of Europe. However, tea carries a different, more complex, and more painful history.
In Yemen, tea exists in multiple forms: Adeni tea, influenced by Indian chai, and red/ black tea in the Turkish style. This diversity reflects Yemen’s social fabric, shaped by non Arab communities of Indian, African, and Turkish origin who have both contributed to and been shaped by Yemeni culture, particularly its cuisine. Yet, despite this richness, my focus is not on tea in Yemen. Although the idea began with Omar’s story, I instead return to tea’s original homeland, China, where the narrative unfolds differently.
In its early history, tea in China was a simple drink associated with medicine and daily ritual. By the 17th century, however, it had transformed into a globally desired commodity, particularly after being embraced by Britain, where it became central to social life. As demand grew rapidly, Britain faced a significant economic imbalance. It was importing vast quantities of tea from China without having sufficient goods to offer in return.
To resolve this imbalance, Britain turned to the opium trade, cultivating opium in India and exporting it to China on a massive scale. Opium became a tool of domination. Its spread led to widespread addiction across Chinese society, causing profound social and economic harm. In response, the Chinese state attempted to halt the crisis. The official Lin Zexu confiscated and destroyed large quantities of opium in an effort to protect the population. This act became the spark that ignited the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842. Britain with its superior naval and military defeated China and imposed the Treaty of Nanking. This marked the beginning of a period of political and economic subjugation. Chinese ports were forcibly opened to foreign trade, heavy reparations were imposed and Hong Kong was ceded to Britain.
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In the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860, Britain and France launched another campaign against China, advancing as far as Beijing and burning the Old Summer Palace, one of the country’s most significant cultural landmarks. China was then forced into further agreements that expanded foreign influence, legalised the opium trade, and granted extensive privileges to foreigners within its borders. These events deepened the weakening of the state, eroded economic control, and contributed to the eventual fall of the Qing dynasty.
This era is known in Chinese history as the Century of Humiliation, a period marked by repeated foreign intervention, internal fragmentation, and a profound loss of sovereignty. The impact of these wars was not only immediate but long lasting, shaping modern China’s political consciousness and its complex relationship with the West. In this context, tea is no longer just a drink. It becomes an entry point into a layered history of colonialism and coerced trade. A simple cup of tea conceals networks of power, economics, and violence, where demand alone was enough to ignite wars and reshape nations.
For this reason, I chose opium as the motif to be carried on the teapot and cups, so I experimented with pen and watercolour, searching for a visual language capable of expressing this narrative.
Then I realised that my project required a deeper level of research, which led me to visit the Victoria Gallery and Museum. As a space I’m already familiar with, particularly for its ceramics and china collection, it offered both a point of return and a site for re-reading objects through a more critical lens.
Upon entering the gallery, I experienced an immediate sense of recognition, I was drawn to the Willow pattern. Its storytelling operates as a form of visual fiction circulated, repeated, and widely accepted, yet detached from its cultural origins. The blue and white aesthetic, often perceived as timeless and decorative, began to reveal itself instead as a coded visual language shaped by histories of translation, imitation, and appropriation.
This encounter also sharpened my awareness of Liverpool’s historical entanglement with colonial trade. The city’s material culture cannot be separated from these conditions.. I became particularly interested in the development of transfer printing the process that enabled the mass reproduction of ceramic which was pioneered locally at the Herculaneum Pottery.
Extending this research, I visited few antique shops, observing ceramic objects more closely in terms of form, surface, and wear. These encounters grounded my understanding of how such objects exist not only as historical artefacts but also as carriers of layered narratives. I documented these visits through photographs and began a series of blue pen drawings as an initial visual response, testing how line, repetition, and colour might translate into my own practice.
I’m drawn to the seed capsule as a central motif, the origin of opium, and a form that holds both fragility and consequence. Its presence operates quietly, yet it carries a dense network of associations: trade, addiction, control, and empire… It functions as a more precise and restrained symbol, resisting overt representation while still holding critical weight. The decision to work with blue and white visual language reinforces this tension between surface beauty and underlying histories.
Early stages
At this stage, I feel prepared to begin planning my final design. What feels significant is how this research, which initially seemed distant and external, has gradually folded back into both local history and my own practice. During my BA, I used a teapot for assembled sculpture featuring a Willow pattern titled Gossip. Revisiting this work now, it reads differently, less as a formal exploration and more as an early, intuitive engagement with themes of narrative, circulation, and miscommunication.
This process has also deepened my awareness of the responsibility embedded in design choices. Selecting what imagery appears on the tea set is not merely aesthetic, it’s conceptual and political. The act of placing an image becomes an act of framing meaning. I think of this as similar to cutting beetroot: the more carefully and precisely it’s handled, the more it stains.. The mark is unavoidable, just as histories do!
Last Friday, I exhibited as part of Ornament–Intent, curated by Emma Rushton at her house in Manchester. The exhibition offered a chance to re-situate my practice within the intimacy of a domestic environment. The curatorial premise, that decoration and political intent flow through the home, aligned closely with my interest in how social and political meaning is transmitted through ordinary gestures, materials and language.
Rushton’s house, transformed into a living exhibition space, blurred the boundaries between art and life. The space carried traces of daily existence, forming a backdrop that resisted the neutrality of the white cube. Within this context, my ceramic works and participatory writing installation became part of an evolving conversation about the home as both refuge and political site.
On a handmade ceramic plate inscribed Sykes–Picot 1916, I presented a red velvet cake. The act of division mirrored the historical partition of the Middle East under the Sykes–Picot Agreement. I used the domestic ritual of cake-cutting, usually symbolic of celebration, generosity and communion, to expose its opposite: consumption, greed and geopolitical appetite.
This gesture was performative in the sense Joseph Beuys might describe as Soziale Plastik (social sculpture), where symbolic action and participation become material. The knife, crumbs and creamy surface formed an ephemeral installation that questioned how colonial histories persist within gestures of hospitality and everyday pleasure.
A second ceramic work consisted of 11 handmade spoons arranged in a circular formation across a white table. Each spoon was inscribed with the name of a country and a range of dates, including Gaza, Bosnia, Yemen, Cambodia, Congo, India, Ireland .. etc marking periods of famine, war and conflict. Together, they formed a kind of geopolitical clock, a cycle of recurring histories and unresolved wounds.
Unlike traditional cartography, this piece used domestic utensils, tools of nourishment and care, to map famines/conflicts. The spoons stood in for mouths, stories and silenced voices, suggesting that global politics is not abstract but deeply entangled with the rhythms of everyday life.
In the setting of Ornament–Intent, this work transformed the dining table into a site of memory. It invited viewers to confront histories of violence not through spectacle but through quiet familiarity. The domestic language of tableware became an entry point into questions of accountability and empathy. The work reflects my ongoing interest in social sculpture as an aesthetic of recontextualisation, where meaning is generated through the repositioning of ordinary materials within spaces of shared attention and care.
Another ceramic piece juxtaposed a sugar bowl labelled Third World with a spoon marked First World. Sugar, a substance historically tied to trade, slavery and colonial wealth, became a material metaphor for extraction and imbalance.
Placed in a domestic setting, the object drew attention to how structural inequalities are embedded in ordinary life. A simple act such as stirring sugar into tea carries invisible histories of power. In this sense, the work functioned as a micro-political sculpture, where meaning emerges not through spectacle but through subtle provocation within the familiar.
A handwritten note, in Arabic and English, listed key dates in Sudan’s history of famine and conflict: 1984, 1993, 2017, 2024, followed by the line (And Sudan’s issues remain words on paper…) with a ceramic spoon read (Money eats first)
Here, I explored the limits of communication and documentation, and how political struggle often becomes archived as text, detached from lived experience. The translation between languages paralleled the translation between activism and representation, between the urgency of lived crisis and the inertia of global indifference. The work questioned the gap between empathy and action, a recurring concern in my social sculpture practice. What is the role of the artist when language itself becomes complicit in the act of forgetting?
In another part of the house, I presented Dear Moon, a participatory installation inviting visitors to write letters to the moon. A small writing table, paper, envelopes and a black letterbox created a space for reflection and dialogue.
This piece extended my ongoing investigation into correspondence and indirect communication, letters that may never reach their destination yet carry emotional truth. The moon, as an unreachable listener, became a symbol of distance, empathy and collective longing.
Here, the act of writing functioned as a social sculpture, a participatory moment that transformed private thought into shared experience. It also reasserted my belief that art can hold silence as much as speech, offering space for what cannot be articulated in political discourse.
Ornament–Intent revealed how the domestic realm, often coded as private or decorative, is inherently political. Within Emma Rushton’s home, art entered the space of the everyday, resisting the hierarchies that separate aesthetic experience from lived reality.
My contribution sought to hold this tension between care and critique, ornament and intent, intimacy and history. Each ceramic object or written phrase acted as a small social gesture, reanimating the conversation between form, politics and communication.
Karema 