The first thing to know about me is that I drink a lot of tea. I guess that’s hardly surprising.

Tea is an important time-slowing ritual in our home. It takes time to pour water into the kettle, watch the kettle boil (yes, it does, even when watched), warm up a teapot, add teabags and wait for them to gently infuse flavour and colour into the steaming water. I sit down to savour the moment of peace and quiet, teacup in hand, dipping a home-baked rusk. Twenty years into our marriage, tea is still an integral part of our relationship and routine. From that first cup of Five Roses in the morning to the last cup of warm Rooibos before bedtime, it is a time for my husband Colin and I to connect, a time to be still, a time to commune. Tea slows time. Teabags are, in a sense, a metaphor for the slowing of time. Time is what I have needed to make my twelve art quilts.

I am a (rather busy) teacher, artist, wife, and mother living in Eswatini, a small, landlocked kingdom in southern Africa tucked between South Africa and Mozambique. The past four years have been ones of managing overhauls to the art departement, enjoying my last moments with both my kids still living at home, and somehow finding the time to do weird things with teabags.

As much as we drink a lot of tea at home, my broader community has been integral to bolstering my stash. Students have handed me their used teabags in plastic bags, staff have placed their discards into a container on the staffroom tea table, some friends have carefully dried out their teabags on wire racks by the kitchen window…

Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I’m known as the crazy teabag lady.

I’ll admit it: there is certainly an element of madness in collecting, drying, cutting, glueing, painting, and sewing together over 15 000 used teabags. But it just feels so right.

The teabag found me during the Covid-19 years, when I was teaching online from home with a mug of tea always in hand, and began crafting art lessons from materials that most anyone would have at home. At the same time, the particular warmth of the staffroom — the 30-minute pause, the shared cuppa, the conversation — felt suddenly, acutely absent. When the world opened again and those conversations resumed, I began collecting the teabags.

I grew up in South Africa. I am white, of German descent, English-speaking, and I have lived most of my adult life in countries that were not the one I was born in, Namibia and Eswatini. I have spent a long time asking what it means to belong somewhere when your history in that place is complicated, when the language on the street is not yours, when the beauty of the landscape you love came at a cost you did not pay but nonetheless inherited. These are not comfortable questions. I have tried not to look away from them (and you can read more about my thoughts on belonging here).

Naturally, this is where teabags meet these difficult questions in a search for belonging. Okay, maybe not naturally. But I think it’ll all make sense if you continue reading.