Hello!

My name is Tee. I’m an artist/illustrator person and most of my pre-residency work was interactive community-based installations. Coming into the residency, I was interested in magic & spellwork.

Researching spell rituals through the internet, my process became manifestation* based. A bulk of my own spell work came from Gabi Abrao’s (@sighswoon) Spell Ritual Guide. + Continuing my forever reading of resistance stories: User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible, Cultural Resistance Reader, A Radical Guide to Tenderness, etc.

I was also eating a lot of egg salad & worrying about the reproductive, sexual and material exploitation of cows. Cows are sacred in my religion, and this is now a popular partisan issue where I come from.

[ a joke for when I transition into stand up comedy: Kolkata born, Kitchener living. ]

I became interested in the Golden Egg. An object from fairytales, it is routinely coveted, stolen, and murdered for. It’s the gold that turns this everyday ingredient into wealth. + Eggs are a symbol of the subjugation of fertility under the current exploitative systems that our ecosystems exist in.

My first thought was to cast an egg shaped sculpture and cover it in gold. I wanted a dozen of them or a whole crate even. Wealth was of interest to me, both in personal finances as well as how wealth is required to make significant systematic changes. + my confusion reading CARFAC & budgets. Really, the entire project was built on my sense of economic anxiety. I hate to admit it, but art practice = art therapy [ lol? ].

This did not come to pass for many reasons. I’ve realized comfort zones exist for a reason. + The supply of gold leaf was running low at my nearest gold leaf (loose) supply store, due to the supply chain disruptions [ re: ongoing pandemic ].

I ended up hollowing out eggs and working with the now-hollowed egg shells instead. The plaster of paris casting wasn’t working as well as I wanted it to [ although, wow, I really want to work with plaster again ]. And work was slow, which was a little frustrating.

In the end, manifestation really kicked in. As I experimented with material, I ended up harvesting gold leaf from an earlier work + working with the egg membrane. There’s a thin layer of soft skin between the shell & the inside content. In my early experimentations, this dried into a lovely paper-like consistency. In the final work, I cover/replace this layer with gold leaf.

Birth is a portal of sorts. Eggs (ovaries) are resources. So what comes after?

The crits were really helpful at this point. I was able to talk through things with an audience that had other references to add in, or thoughts to bounce off with. I also had conversations with friends and other art folks I knew about materials and concept, etc.

My final work has swerved into Alchemy.

My current research can be located in transformation + resources = alchemy. The web installation, I’m still working through.

The current text that is hanging out with the animations is from the Emerald Tablet, considered one of the first (surviving) alchemic texts. I’m not sure if it’s quite right + I want to pull in Bengali words, but still not sure.

This is where things are at now. This is a new way of working for me, one that doesn’t necessarily require an audience to complete the work (vs. interactive work). I’ll probably be tweaking this until I get things just right. So thank you for looking. I hope it’s closer to its final form the next time you two meet.

Thank you Roundtable!

<3
tee


[ c u on the internet! @lukitstee on insta ☻ ]


*Manifesting is essentially a process by which you think something into your reality. For example: you envision a new living space so much, as you apply to apartments or go through life, a new living space makes itself available to you. Ta-da! Living space manifested.