Elevating the humble rich tea biscuit to art, ‘Rich Tea’ takes the legacy of Duchamp’s Readymades and places it within the quintessential British past time of drinking tea. Designed to be eaten as a snack, the biscuits ephemeral shelf-life is extended to be more solid-seeming phenomenon of sculptural form. Its circular form, meanwhile is broken by the artist’s bite – an echo of the bite of an apple, the symbol of Britishness but also lost innocence, which poses the question, what knowledge has the artist gained from the taste of it?
‘In 2006 I saw Gavin Turk’s Rich Tea ‘Bitten’ Biscuit artwork at the Art Car Boot Fair. I bought the artwork and proudly displayed it in my home and when True Rocks was born in 2014, there was a real cartoon light bulb moment, after almost ten years of walking past it, looking at it and loving it. It suddenly dawned on me that it would make the most stunning piece of jewellery. The Rich Tea ?Bitten? Biscuit collaboration was born‘. – True Rocks.
