Artist Olha Pryymak will host an in-person or online tea session, subject to COVID-19 restrictions. Please note that maintain social distancing guidelines this event will take place outdoors with an extremely limited capacity.

A conversation over a cup of hibiscus tea and an opportunity to pay deeper attention to human-plant relationships. It is an invitation to draw out the hedonistic and the pleasurable, aesthetic and physical personal histories with plants, borrowing the session format from colloquial herbalist practices. 

Book on to one of three afternoon sessions, either 12 PM - 12:45 PM, 1:00 - 1:45 PM or 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM. These will be held on a grassy area outside San Mei Gallery, complying with current COVID-19 restrictions, unless you specifically request to have yours held on Zoom. * There will be a maximum of four participants in each session.

This event is priced on a sliding scale in order to make it more accessible. Please give what you can to support the artist and the gallery's public programme.

Inspired by Matthew Beach's exhibition The Herbarium's Shadow which will open online from 3 April with a small series of virtual events and then will open physically at San Mei Gallery to the public from 15 April.

*If the current COVID- 19 government plan were to change resulting in stricter restrictions, sessions will occur online and a package of tea will be sent out for you to use in the session.

About Olha Pryymak

Olha Pryymak’s work is driven by curiosity in plant-human relationships, using both oil paint and participatory performance as a tool to think through them. Painting allows for paying undivided attention to what is deemed important: the emotional flavour of lived experiences with the plants, on the way that the plants make you feel, savouring each brushstroke as a point of meditation on this interdependent relationship. These experiences usually stem from the performative side of Olha’s practice – staged encounters with plants in the form of participatory tea sessions – part Ukrainian peasant healer seance, part tea ceremony, rooted in her heritage of Ukrainian folk herbalism.

Olha’s work has been shown across the UK at the National Portrait Gallery, Lewisham Arthouse, Arthouse1, Transition and Alice Herrick gallery, as well as included in shows in the US, Italy and Japan. Follow Olha on Instagram or visit their website to find out more.