Tea Tea
Manchester and Kent
Tea (Peter Hatton, Val Murray, Lynn Pilling) is a group of artists who make work for and about places: towns, streets, houses, shops, parks, factories, waterways, galleries and areas of regeneration. We construct new versions of these places using installation, documented performance, video and publications.
Including, but also going beyond obvious references of architecture and social history, we delve into the substrata, the hidden lives, of particular places and how and where they might be represented.
These new versions critique accepted representations and offer alternative, often witty, navigations of urban space. For example, Spinning a Yarn commissioned by The Whitworth, used performance to juxtapose the layered identities of buildings associated with cotton (e.g. mill / homes, stately home / costume gallery). Recordings of these playful incidents were incorporated into a 6 metre high projection of fabrics from the Whitworth’s collection. In Boat Trip: Nothing but Flowers, commissioned by The Lowry, we took members of the public on boat trips on the Manchester Ship Canal. The view out of the window was interrupted by recordings of strange incidents which had taken place on the bank and accompanied, of course, by a live commentary.
Sometimes our explorations involve working with people from the area, other professionals and other arts practitioners. As part of the regeneration programme of Widnes Waterfront, in Brown Fields, Blue Skies, we set up ‘hides’ on the wasteland left by the chemical industry and invited experts and passers by to take tea with us and exchange ideas about the place.
We are interested in the idea of representing one place in another. In Looking Both Ways commissioned by Tate Liverpool we built an evolving installation which reflected on the nearby iconic Liver Building which is also a work place for many people.
In our very first project together, Homeworks, we initiated a residency in a run down terraced house where we constructed installations in the rooms. In a recent video project Visible Cities, two women in tailored HiVis jackets set about investigating an area around the Manchester / Salford border.
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