Available artworks here: https://www.artsy.net/artist/michele-landel
Michele Landel has explored the tea bag shape for some time and is interested in the personal associations that these tiny folded pieces of paper occupy. Tea bags are delicate but also meant to withstand being submerged in scalding water. The tiny bags carry fragrant packages that are created to be depleted and their contents to seep and spread away.
Found photographs of women are digitally merged and blended to create simultaneously a universal woman and a woman who does not exist. This woman is divided and cut into many to show the multiple identities and fractured selves that one often simultaneously inhabits.
This woman is layered onto the artist’s photograph of a beach. Referencing both ancient associations of the sea representing primordial chaos, only controlled by God or Gods and more modern literary associations of the sea as representing time and mortality. The seascapes also are stand-ins for the water that the eventual tea bag is meant to be dunked or left to steeped in.
The digitally collaged image is printed on both thin semi translucent paper that mimics the paper used for tea bags and on stiffer paper that is cut and attached to the backside of the semi translucent paper. The paper is carefully folded and glued into the shape of a teabag. The figure appears on both sides of the bag. One side she is erased with layers of colored thread. On the reserve side she is visible but as a ghostly figure seen behind the seascape and through the paper. By appearing multiple times while never clearly visible, she again emphasizes the fractured identities and memories used to create personal autobiographies.
Rather than tea leaves or herbal flowers, the bag is filled with black sand that the artist collected from a beach in Iceland. The black sand mimics the contents of a tea bag but is weightier and connects back to the beaches printed on the paper that represent chaos (volcanic rocks) and time (sand in an hourglass).
A simple natural colored string pierces and is tied in a similar fashion as the string on a tea bag. An image of the same but now empty seascape is printed on the tag that is tied to the end of the string. So that when the viewer imagines raising and lowering the tea bag into a cup of hot water her fingers would both replace and connect with the woman on the bag.
The women on each bag are lighthouses and symbolize human wants and needs that pulsates over the chaos and sea and guides people’s passage throughout it, yet also stays curiously unattainable. The colored thread that covers the woman is intended to mimic the colors of light that emanate from the lighthouse. The woman herself is the light; she is the fire. The tea bag shape itself is intended to tie the women to the personal and cultural associations the viewer has with the act of brewing and drinking tea and the personal spaces where this occurs. These teabags cannot be used to make actual tea but still encourage the viewer to imagine the flavor and scent of the women’s pulsating desires and the depletion of these needs if they were allowed to seep away. While at the same time referring to the medieval and early modern (16th to 17th centuries) practice of dunking women who were accused of witchcraft or simply being overly opinionated (scolding).