Happy New Year from The Teacosy* Revolution

Here's wishing you all a very happy new year and wonderfully wholesome and healthy and love-filled 2008!

This image was taken by our friend Luca Roncoroni during two weeks of hotel suite construction at the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi, Northern Sweden at the end of 2005. Pictured are myself, Tara Badcock, and my good friend and fellow artist (ice/snow, textiles and performance art), Julia Adzuki, during our "Iced Tea" performance inside the ice house we constructed inside our Ice Hotel room! We are both wearing tea cosies I made in Paris and Sweden, with the most glamorous skirts we could rustle up for the occasion!

If you would like to see more images of my tea cosies (until the www.teacosyrevolution.info website is constructed), please visit my flickr site: www.flickr.com/photos/tarabadcock

Warmest wishes, xxxxxxTara

www.paristasmania.com
www.flickr.com/photos/tarabadcock/
http://www.icehotel.com/Winter/Icehotel/Art/2006/Suite303/

A real life knitted tea cosy.....

This tea cosy I spotted in the kitchen of my dear friend Anoushka, a couple of weeks ago...its a real tea cosy, one of the 1930's style knitted numbers, only this one looks like a 1980's cosy, going by the particular combination of colours...tres, tres 1980's!

"Teacosy Number 20; Bonny Wee Haggis Cosy", 2007.
I made this tea cosy in June this year and its a personal favourite, with the old piece of bagpipe I found in a junk shop stitched into the cosy!

The cosy has been inspired by three favourite comic things:

1) the underwater bagpipe taxi in one of the Goon Show episodes,

2) Monty Python's Flying Circus' sketch where the Blancmanges (who are alien invaders friom another planet), challenge Scotland to a Wimbledon tennis match, because Scotland is the only country that has [had?] never won Wimbledon and the Blancmanges knew they couldnt lose...and this was the reason they invaded earth..... anyway, the Scottish tennis player was all kitted out with Kilt, sporrin, floppy tartan hat and red hair and beard...

3) One of my all-time favourite dinner parties in Paris with my Anglo-Australian friends, the Moen siblings; John had brought a really good (?!) haggis from Inverness in Scotland and we cooked it up with parsnips and vegies in my tiny Chambre de Bonne in Paris, above my employer's apartment, 10 square metres and us three squished around my card table dining table making jokes about wild roaming haggis in our mock Scottish accents...hence the name, Bonny Wee Haggis.

This tea cosy is currently on display at Artifakt Gallery in Deloraine, Northern Tasmania and was purchased by a friend of mine who seems keen on my tea cosies...which is fantastic!!!

Teacosy* Revolution Portrait: Wesleydale Gothic, December 2007

Teacosy* Revolution Portrait: Wesleydale Gothic, December 2007

Today my friend Monique and I 'enacted' a new Teacosy* Revolution Portrait, one which I have been itching to make for nearly a year! The inspiration for the image comes from old family photo postcards I have collected from Antique shops and second-hand bookshops, which mostly date from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras...lots of heavy black silk dresses and dour facial expressions as the subjects of the portraits strained to hold their poses in front of the slow and sensitive old tripod cameras with their glass negative plates. I love all that loaded imagery and those loaded metaphores, resplendent on a 2D surface.

The two tea cosies in the image are: 'Teacosy* Number 28; Black Widow Cosy', 2006-2007, & 'Teacosy* Number 3; Holy Trinity Cosy', 2007. Both cosies, collection: The Artist.
Photographer: Rainier Howe
Location: Wesleydale Farm Estate, Tasmania

My Maroccan friend Zarhloul's tea cosy

I'm not sure if Zarhloul has made this tea cosy out of found baskets... I really love what he's done!
Thanks for the images Zarhloul!
www.zarhloul.com