At the Gardiner Ceramic Museum in Toronto I saw a small traveling Tea Set, which used to be popular for people having afternoon tea on picnics, and it made me wonder what if ceramics were as portable as a sketchbook, what would it look like? My first Traveling Tea box Set is the ceramic diary of a young girl on an imaginary journey. I completed the pieces in the studio over the same time I imagined the journey to take, using both text and image. Prior to beginning the journey, the forms were glazed and sinter-fired to make the glazed surface durable enough to survive being erased, yet porous to absorb stains. Once the journey was finished, the set was fired to maturity and fit into a custom made traveling box. The second and third traveling box sets were completed by real people on brief but real trips, the first at the Banff Arts centre in 2008, and the third in Albuquerque in 2009. For both these projects I used a series of archetypal themes, then made thematically specific boxes containing theme specific sinter-fired ceramic forms, materials, and images. Participants would then borrow a box for a day and return it once done, whereupon another layer of glaze was applied to the ceramic forms and they were sinter-fired again, then replaced in the box for another participant to use on another day. In this way each objects contains the layering of writing and drawings from multiple participants over multiple days. Once each project was finished the ceramic objects were fired to maturity which revealed all the layers of marks.

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