Project 3 - Development Sketches

I have done a range of preliminary sketches to try to get a good idea of what my piece could look like. I'm not the best at sketching, so I hope y'all can understand them properly :)

 This one is based off a tiered cake stand, the sort one might expect to see at a fancy afternoon tea, except larger, large enough to place teapots and cups from the two cultures (English and Japanese) on the stand instead of cakes. I would have teapots/kettles on the bottom layer, with cups (and saucers) on the second layer, and samples of tea (e.g. English breakfast tea bags, or matcha powered green tea).
Because the cake stand is English, I feel that this would probably overpower the balance of the two cultures, and send the whole thing spinning violently towards the English culture's side of the table. Maybe another way to do this would be to have just Japanese tea ceremony equipment on the cake stand, but I feel that would not give the meaning I intend, as it would seem more like the English assimilating the Japanese culture, and putting it on show. The Anglo-Saxon culture has been assimilating other cultures throughout history, so this is a very valid point to make in a piece of art like this, it is just not the intention I have for this project. Idea filed for later use :)

 I'm rather fond of this piece - it's a 'tea' tree (Camellia Sinesis) with hot water pouring down from somewhere out of the frame, running down over the leaves and into the two teacups - one English style and one Japanese style. This piece is far more suited to some sort of painting, which I'm not particularly good at, mainly because I don't enjoy it enough to spend the required time practising. The black tea and green tea that is common in the two cultures I am using comes from the same tree, so the same water comes down, and half goes down either side, becoming green tea on the left, flowing into the Japanese style teacup, and black tea on the right, flowing into the English style teacup. This symbolises how similar the two cultures are, even though they developed in completely separate areas. In the image I have drawn a teapot for the pot the plant is in, the idea is that you can put any tea into a teapot to pout into whatever cups (representing cultures) you like. This represents that though we are different cultures, from vastly different areas, we all still come from the same place - we all live on the same earth, and we are all one species. The different teas, the green and black symbolise the differences in our cultures, the small and big things we do differently, even as we do them the same - we all drink tea, all from the same plant, however we have different ways of drinking the tea.

 This is an earlier version of the previous image. It involves a Camellia Sinesis tree planted in a teapot in the centre of a table, with the teacups set up around it as though for a groups of friends to sit down and have some tea, but the teacups are mixed from both the English and Japanese tea cultures. This is meant to show the differences in the two tea cultures, but then have the tree that all the tea comes from in the centre, pulling it all together into one afternoon tea/tea ceremony.

This one is a set up of a cup of tea in english style and a cup of tea in japanese style across the table from each other, as though they are having a cup of tea with each other. Each of the cups represents their own culture, so the set up is symbolic of a conversation between the Japanese Culture and the English Culture. The tea itself represents a common ritual in each culture, one that shows many similarities and differences between the cultures. Tea is important in both cultures, but the circumstances is quite different in each culture, as described in an earlier post Tea and Ceremony - Project 3 Research.
This would be set up as an installation, with a real china English tea set and a proper Japanese tea set placed opposite each other on a short wooden table. At one end I would have a chair, and at the other end I would have a cushion, both fairly traditional methods of seating for each respective cultural ritual.

This one is quite confusing because I draw and noted on the image from one side, then turned it upside down and did the same for the other half of the table. It is basically the same as the table layout with the tea cups and pot and thing, but this would be photos of the implements laid out on the surface of the table in the way they would have been if they were real. This would have probably be more easy (and cheap) than getting ahold of the pieces themselves, however it would make the piece very flat, and that goes against my interests in installation. I want to make pieces that look like real scenes, something where you could actually see someone in there, drinking the tea, talking to someone else across the table...

These were quick doodles I did while thinking about minimalist symbols for tea cups. I did not go far into this because it is not the area I'm interested in, also, neither of them really stood out as anything from a specific culture, unless that culture was coffee -.-
The top one had been intended as an English tea cup, and the bottom as a Japanese. I mainly tried to portray this with the shape of the cups themselves, and with the pouring of the tea into the Japanese cup, as the ceremony itself is just as, if not more important than the actual drinking of the tea in that culture.