Day-to-Day Data
Tim Taylor
Title: Our Daily Drugs (Morning Action Patinas)
Location: Page-based commission for the Publication

From 11 – 20 April 2005, Tim performed a daily ritual, collecting data about his tea drinking habits. Every morning after he had finished his customary cup of tea he took the used tea bag and dropped it from a height of eight feet onto a piece of plain paper – creating a unique tea stain drawing. In the publication, the resulting images, displayed across three pages, appear as abstract blotches, but, when combined with the date and time at which they were made, they become a diary of his weekly routine.
detail from Our Daily Drugs (Morning Action Patinas)
detail from Our Daily Drugs (Morning Action Patinas)
Get up, get washed, get dressed, make a cup of tea. Most British people perform this sequence of events every day, if not necessarily in that order. The daily ritual of the morning cup of tea is an intrinsic part of the British way of life. Furthermore it is one of the more common and widespread practices indicative of the natural disposition of human nature to seek out mental and physical stimuli. Whilst in other cultures the act of tea making is given overt deference through ritual, it is an act that we generally take for granted. It is this act that I wanted to acknowledge and celebrate.

How to celebrate this daily act? What is it a tea bag would like to do once it has fulfilled its reason for creation other than ending up in the bin, or sitting around on the end of a spoon until it is time to wash up? ‘Splat!’ seemed like the obvious answer. Every morning for a fixed period of time, following the making of my morning cup of tea, I dropped the used teabag from a height of 8ft on to a sheet of paper, thereby interrupting its passage to the bin. I then added the time and date of dropping. In this way the work become a daily record of a fixed point in time within my daily life. Sundays were invariably missing (tea being replaced by coffee) and Saturdays were often recorded later than usual, and with a noticeable difficulty to keep the point of landing to the centre on the paper. The title Morning Action Patina alludes to the time of creation, the role the act of dropping plays in their creation and to the use of tea to give works of art a false patina.

Splat! on the paper.

Tim Taylor
April 2005


www.timgtaylor.com


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