I limit the materials I use to create my work. These self-imposed restrictions increase my ability to investigate expression.  At the same time, it is also my practice to see every material as fair game for art-making.  I try to incorporate my habits and routines into my art work. I’m committed to the reuse and recycle of materials. One important daily practice is handwritten journaling. I usually deconstruct these pages, fragmenting and restructuring language. The secret contents are intact, yet undecipherable, and much of my work incorporates these fragments. Drinking a lot of black tea is another daily habit where I recycle materials into art. For years I’ve saved the bags, and composted the tea.   For this show, I chose to restructure tea bags, forming another kind of vocabulary. This work is created out of hundreds of units of used teabags and tea tabs forming sculptural, totemic installations. Concealed but not revealed in these structures are conversations and silence, intimacy, and memory  - all centered around the taking of tea. I imagine the tea being sipped over the Sunday Times or daily newspaper, conversations between friends, intimacy between lovers, new ideas and discoveries, thoughts, and conversations that happened over the drinking of these teas.

Traditionally, tea bags have been square or rectangular in shape. More recently circular and pyramidal bags have come onto the market. I did not discriminate on the shape of bag or whether the bag was composed of paper or nylon for this project.

A surprising community of collaboration cropped up for these tea works. Many people around the country responded to my blog request, ‘Save the Teabags’. I received teabags in the mail from perfect strangers across the country, teabags delivered to my doorstep, people making steady deposits into my tea bank account. Total strangers chose to become participants in the composition of art.

This amalgamation of processes transforms remnants of time, personal history and the environment into a language of artifacts and personal archaeologies.

Bio

Daniella Woolf holds an M.A. in Design from UCLA, and a B.A. in Art from Cal State University Northridge. She is a 2007 recipient of the Gail Rich Award for excellence in the arts in Santa Cruz, and a 2008 awardee of the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship.  Over her career she has worked in a variety of media, including jewelry and metal, fiber and textiles, collage, installation, book arts and most recently encaustic. She has studied in New York with R and F paints, and teaches popular encaustic workshops across the country. Her current work is about identity, privacy and memory, and is exhibited nationally and internationally. Important to her practice is fostering creative collaboration and community. She is curating an online exhibition and presentation for the upcoming Encaustic Conference in Boston, entitled Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility. She is an active member of the International Encaustic Artists, the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists, the Surface Design Association, and President of the Lucky Girls Society. She maintains and works in studios in Santa Cruz and Whidbey Island. She writes a BLOG entitled Encausticopolis about all things wax, under the name Dotty Stripes.