7:5

Group exhibition, Two rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2009

Presented as part of a group exhibition at Two Rooms—an independent contemporary art gallery located in a converted warehouse in central Auckland—Tea Leaf Reading is a three-channel video installation that explores memory, impermanence, and the quiet mechanics of transformation.

Each video documents the gradual dissolution of an image drawn in loose tea leaves. Archival and personal photographs are rendered with care, then allowed to shift through the subtle, uncontrolled influence of gravity and vibration. In one, a wartime photograph of a soldier aiming at a mother and child gives way to a peaceful variation—suggesting an alternate history. Another features Raffaello’s lost Portrait of a Young Man, slowly breaking apart yet never fully disappearing. The third transforms a fragment of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation into a childhood photo of the artist, and then into an ancient oak tree—each image bearing silent witness to what came before.