Each of the six figures represents a stage of porcelain’s introduction to Europe. NATALI WISEMAN
Porcelain can be hard to engage with. It’s inert, functional, cold. That’s why English artist Claire Partington’s site-specific “intervention” in the Porcelain Room at Seattle Art Museum, titled Taking Tea, is so thrilling.
Her installation tells the violent and fraught history behind these shiny, valuable objects that drastically shaped British culture, fashion, and economics. Porcelain use in England was “fueled by this craze for tea,” Partington explains, and the wares would have to endure long and dangerous sea voyages from China—trips that many sailors died on, whether because of storms or enemy ships.
