Julian's Tea House
hello and welcome to julians house of tea...here is a tea house i built for a recent exhibit, and a writen piece by my teacher...any comments would be appreciated, enjoy...julian
The House that Julian Built
Portable Tea Ceremony performance on May 16, 2000, at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario.
The teahouse is nothing. It is a poorly wrought structure made of metal poles and irregular pieces of canvas that have been sewn together; many would characterize it as charming, others as pathetic. But to focus on the aesthetic appearance of the teahouse would be to miss the point. It is a detail in a ritual that is just as temporal, fragile, and
impressionable. The tea ceremony, the occasion framed by the house, is, like the house, a point of convergence, an opportunity for exchange. Our lives are a patchwork of experiences, some larger pieces than others, but all are placed together in an almost haphazard fashion despite our best efforts to organize them. The house, like the teacup, provides a setting in which some of those experiences can be drawn out and consumed. Why could these activities not be undertaken in a different setting? They could, they should, but they don't. We have little time to spend together and those times we do spend together are filled with distractions, with unnecessary clutter that minimizes the value of human interchange. The teahouse provides a fragile moment of containment, where the material variables of our everyday existence are temporarily held at bay: they are not denied, they are simply set aside for an instant. However, the teahouse is not a shelter; the ceremony is not a refuge. If anything, the tea ceremony is exactly the opposite. It forces us to value what we take so much for granted. In fact, it is our material possessions and distractions that are the escape since they deny exactly what the tea ceremony offers -- the opportunity for an exchange of ideas, passions, and memories, all seeped in the warmth generated by the company of others.
These are just a few thoughts along the way since the impressions recorded here will have taken on a new form by the time the ink has dried.
John Hatch