Cardew Club News » 2006 » October

Sometimes, when an artwork seems unduly difficult or even maddeningly opaque, it’s entirely fair to ask yourself if this difficulty (whether real or only apparent) is because the work is innately and thus necessarily hard to crack, or whether it’s just badly organized or awkwardly envisaged.

Such is the case with the pieces making up this new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Marla Hlady at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

Hlady’s work — which is unfailingly elegant and, if you ever come to the heart of it, poignant and often mordantly amusing — is really very hard to get at without the aid of the exhibition’s various attendant and supportive texts (some by Hlady herself).

Green tea is defined as tea that has not been fermented, as black tea is, before the leaves are dried - and it’s not always green in color.
Green tea experts advise using the best quality possible. The tea should be first brewed for half the time suggested in the package directions, then tasted to see if further brewing is desired.

The higher the water temperature, the more bitter and astringent the taste can become. Experts in green tea recommend using only filtered or bottled water, although some prefer filtered tap water, as many bottled waters contain less oxygen, an important factor in making green tea. Ideally, the teapot and tea cups should be warmed in hot water before using.

British workers waste almost a quarter of their day making tea, gossiping and planning holidays, a poll has found.
The results show Britons are the most distractible and unproductive in Europe, despite working the longest hours.

The average employee spends 22 per cent of the working day chatting, Internet surfing or reading the paper, with the biggest timewaster being the tea run.
Just over half of workers (53 per cent) confessed to spending more time making a brew than on business.

The office environment has become so distracting that professionals are increasingly choosing to work from home, the survey for printer company Lexmark found.

Late at night, when everyone is sound asleep, Wally Wright’s teapots might start moving.
With twisted handles, sharp edges and soft details, some of those clay objects tower two feet toward the ceiling and look nothing like a teapot.
People see knights, horses, houses and flowers when they look at them — and the list goes on, Wright said.

Jill Summerhayes, Cambridge

By now, many of you will be aware that indeed there are big things brewing at the Cambridge Fire Department [that’s Cambridge in Canada, for those of you in the UK wondering why you’ve not heard about this!].

The ‘Get Turned on to Tea’ campaign has begun. You may have seen the photo of firefighter Sid DaSilva at the community kiosk selling tea and red teapots. This is a fundraising campaign for the Fire Hall Museum and Education Centre, housed in the old fire hall on Dickson Street.

Instead of a news article per se, today we’ve got a snippet from an essay on design, written by Donald Norman. He’s discusses some of his teapots, each of which are pretty unique, so we thought we’d share that segment with you all:

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I have a collection of teapots. One of them is completely unusable—the handle is on the same side as the spout. It was invented by the French artist Jacques Carelman, who called it a coffeepot: a “coffeepot for masochists.”

A model displays a container of green tea yesterday on the Swedish ship Gotheborg, docked along Shanghai’s Bund. The pot was one of 100 tea containers from east China’s Anhui Province that were presented to representatives of the 18th-century merchant ship replica. Cargo including tea from Anhui was recovered from the wreckage of the first Gotheborg, which crashed on the rocks near its home port on a return journey from China in 1745.

(this bulletin was taken from englsh.eastday.com)