Steeps & Spells | Saturday, January 16, 2021 — 10 AM PST | 6 PM GMT
Presented by virtual care lab and Olha Pryymak

Artist Olha Pryymak hosts an intimate virtual tea session, based on her Ukrainian herbalist heritage. She creates a form of herbal seance with key actions and spells that weave associative narratives around plants and open our kinetic and olfactory memories. This ritual seeks to draw out all the hedonistic and pleasurable personal histories that are associated with plant-based drinks and explore concepts of nourishment. The tea session is an invitation for generous imagining and world-building, an opportunity to pay deeper attention to our relationship with plants, and to collectively forge new connections with non-human allies.

Olha’s interest in plants stems from her family’s colloquial, everyday uses of herbal medicine — knowledge handed down for generations from her great grandmother, the whisperer, sayer of spells. Since her spells were lost between Ukraine’s wars and regime changes, these participatory performances are attempts to re-imagine those rituals and incantations: a hopeful spell to make participants co-authors of their personal mythologies within a new ecology. What does it mean to be with plants in our age, cultivating this new being by sharing thoughts with cultivating, building a new world in mind.

Please register by Tuesday, January 5, and email virtualcarelab@gmail.com with your mailing address, and we’ll mail you some herbal tea you can use. (Late registrants are also welcome to use their own tea)

Donations are highly appreciated ($5-10 is recommended to account for tea and postage!)

About the host:
Olha Pryymak stages participatory performances that are part Eastern European healer session, part tea ceremony. She builds intimate emotional encounters around a cup of tea and explore cultural constructs around nourishment. Informed by these encounters, her painting negotiates these plant-human relationships with the synonymous sumptuousness of oil paint. Like plants converting light into organic matter for nutrition, her paintings become temporary stores of lived experience that carry nutritional potential.

Her recent shows and projects include Sensorium at Verv Lab, London; Herbal Tea Labo at AIR-Yamanashi, Kofu; Lewisham Art House and ArtHouse1, London. opryymak.com

virtual care lab is a series of experiments in remote connection, powered by NAVEL.