As I hold this mug of tea, I am held. How can we be held by place while we simultaneously hold it too? Through the media of ‘capturing’ this project considers questions home as an object and home as a place, each offering a sense of belonging. How do we as humans traverse the two, physically and virtually, holding and being held?

In responding to this, my local context has become my site of exploration. Between the scales of the handheld tangible mug, to the community vicinity of Peckham where I reside. I trace my movement around my home, the banality yet cruciality of ritual becomes apparent as I hold my mug of tea and take a sip. Grasp, steady, encompass. I trace my movement down Rye Lane, the hustle-and-bustle coinciding with the sense of humble comfort expressed by shoppers, sellers and sitters as they are held by this place. Grasp, steady, encompass.

Maintaining a trace of ourselves when in new spaces is part of ‘belonging’, is there a parallel present in what a ‘morning cuppa’ ritual offers me and Rye Lane, Peckham offers to the diverse and diasporic community, anchoring us as individuals and as a community? Further exploring this idea of tracing in the form of unconscious photographic capture, alongside using the genesis of movement surrounding my tea ritual to guide mark making, the two strands come together to stitch this sense of ‘to hold and be held’ in an uncalculated media outcome.

Through tracing motions of my everyday experience internally and externally, the concept of ‘Homescape’ becomes layered. Beyond the quietly personal ritual of a ‘morning cuppa’ lies a great significance of a commodity. Tea is a substance with huge cultural magnitude, its story is steeped with extraction, exploitation and appropriation. ‘To hold and be held’ explores tea as a direct product of imperialistic trade we treasure with such warmth, alongside the perhaps less obvious human migration patterns induced through Imperialism, the likes of which have given rise to diasporic areas such as Peckham. Relocation and remaking of home is an aspect making up a large part of the identity of London and Londonders, a somewhat transient and ever transforming city. Therefore, having arrived in Peckham two years ago, situating myself as a relative newcomer, subjectively an ‘outsider’, is an important part of pondering how I may feel held being situated here.

Rye Lane is an artery running through the London Borough of Southwark - home to one of the largest Nigerian diaspora communities in the UK (12,000 people). Experiencing my immediate location of Rye Lane everyday, I am aware of its nature as a landscape of diversity and culture. I came to further understand this through the exhibition ‘Lagos Peckham Repeat’ at the South London Gallery (SLG). Framed around ideas of migration and pilgrimage, it explored complexities and shifting notions of home and identity. By inspecting historical and lived experience links between Nigeria's capital Lagos and Peckham, it channels the exchange of culture. The work follows a real and implied journey through a curated familiarity which I hope to reciprocate in my exploration of photography as a medium to test narration of ‘Homescape’.

My initial investigation followed the actions which make up and give power to the sense of ‘to hold and be held’. Using choreography, I explored the body as a capture machine - a mediator for mark making. Considering space, weight, flow and time influencing the capturing, how can these gestures become something still and ‘held’? I perform my ritual pattern with greater emphasis - to grasp, steady and encompass - tracing the natural movement of the tea within the mug as I hold it through its mark making.

Similarly, I felt prompted by the writing of Bell Hooks to give intention to walking - allowing for interrogation of the ongoing question of my place in this space and more widely as Hooks speaks of - our position on earth as humans. Bell Hooks sees the ability and practice of walking your space a non-negitionale in delivering a sense of ‘homeplace’. To do this, I walked and filmed the 8 minute length of Rye Lane, whilst holding my camera (phone) with a hold and perspective as if it were my mug of tea, taking away the element of direction encouraged me to be critical in challenging the usual method of capturing from a personal eye view. Testing the power assumed in the camera when controlled by the beholder - I have relinquished control of recording. Followed by intentional and reflective ‘capture’ of multiple stills from the single take video allowed for pulling apart and to spatialise the scenes, acting as an editorial decision of poignant moments.

Critically, the media method of photography is an action of holding. In itself, ‘capturing’ delivers a sense of aggression and extractivism - my project begins to explore this via photography of territory and creation of community in its physical form, whilst I walk within it. This media outcome will express the links between genealogy and geography - similar to that explored by Anne-Marie Fortier in their essay Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s). Fortier recognises how our contemporary world allows for and encourages the transcendent shapeshifting of cultures as they ground themselves within new physical spaces, as is the case for the collective identity in Peckham and commodification of tea - we each find a sense of ‘home’ amongst these.

Regularly traversing and capturing Rye Lane the project also responds to the theme of Multiples, Repetition and Seriality. Multiple iterations of capturing achieved through varying media formats (photography, mark making) alongside numerous moments (days, locations, time) has developed a series of similar yet unrepeatable documentations of the practice of holding and being held, of object and space. Furthermore, the crucial repetition of action in the process of selecting still frames from a video exploits the media relationship between film and photography.

Teabags are a mass produced item, seemingly identical per brand / type. Furthermore, Tate search brings 4,631 results for ‘tea’ including David Hockney’s Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style (1961) and Ai Wei Wei’s A Ton of Tea (2007) - both appropriately distort and question our relationship with tea. These works in particular within a vast field of search results made me critically understand, despite our initial interpretation, in essence every teabag is never quite the same as the one before, there is an unconsidered seriality to the teabag. Through means of a contemporary metropolis there is an ongoing curation of a home-from-home, plurality of place to feel held in order to hold onto. In itself this is a depiction of the intended repetition of a landscape on the scale of Rye Lane Peckham acting as a ‘Little Lagos’ within London and the scale of my mug of tea being a sense of comfort. Through simultaneous experimentation in physical and digital recordings I was able to draw parallels in narrative to question the essence of rootedness - ‘to hold and be held’ - and how this directly translates to the media of photography (from video) and mark making as forms of serial capture.

I have used photography stills from an 8 minute video taken from the perspective of my mug held walking down Rye Lane. My intention is to question ideas of author vs. director, giving control within an editing process but not dictating the action originally recorded. This challenges the assumed relationship to our view when capturing being chosen, as opposed to experienced. Additionally, utilising tea within my mug to trace movement, alludes to gestures without using words as a medium - questioning how ritual and object interact with environment.

The duality of combining the tactile and intangible media, responding to each other and the artist I have found, evokes a critical curation of moments and mark-making. My interest in further exploiting the presentation method of photography to create a palpable outcome, led to testing printing onto alternative materials - teabags, provoking the idea that the media which holds the project, simultaneously is the material of the project. In the subjection of the familiar, this self reflective project of eight printed tea bags alongside eight tea traces, will encourage viewer reflection, delivering a poetic narrative in combining ritual and place as the core of belonging.