Decorated with an ackee motif, this ceramic teacup becomes a symbol of cultural traditions colliding and botanical exchange. Made by the artist and designer, Jamaican-born Jenny Mein, the cup at once represents rituals of British tea drinking and Caribbean cooking traditions. As a bone china teacup, the object also speaks to the global histories of the tea trade, also shaped by colonial networks that moved crops, knowledge, and people across continents.
By pairing a traditionally British teacup with the image of ackee, the piece brings together multiple stories of migration and empire shaping what people eat and drink today in everyday life. Although ackee is strongly associated with Caribbean cuisine, tea and the teacup are widely considered as quintessentially British. The ackee emblem on this particular object calls into question cultural ownership of non-native plants.
Mein was born in Jamaica but now lives in the UK. She is a lover of the English garden and this whimsical, nostalgic style can also be felt in her art. Jenny has been designing these pieces since 1998. The idea to create these decorative ceramic pieces came whilst Mein was working as a food editor. She was featuring a special summer tropical spread, and had wanted to style the food using botanical plates decorated with tropical fruit and flowers for the photographic shoot. Following an unsuccessful search, she was unable to find a single botanical plate that featured tropical fruit or flowers. She “immediately decided that [she] would produce botanical china using [her] hand-paintings of the fruit and flowers which grew in [her] beautiful childhood family garden on an old sugar estate in Jamaica to decorate the china”.
