For smudge studio, the creative minds behind OBSERVATORY, the journey began nearly two decades ago. In 2022, their vision materialized into a storefront in Belfast, Maine, where art, tea, and planetary transformation intersect. In the midst of significant planetary and environmental changes, they aim to create a space that provides respite, nourishment, and a public area for collaborative rejuvenation. The language they’re currently using to frame OBSERVATORY is as a “waystop along the path of planetary transformation”. Inspired by waystops along pilgrimage routes and hiking trails, OBSERVATORY beckons weary travelers to pause, reflect, and connect.

Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth are the dynamic duo behind smudge studio. Inspired by both ancient and contemporary observations of Earth’s time and place in the cosmos, they stage embodied engagements with the planet’s ever-transforming events and conditions—human and nonhuman. Jamie, an artist and Assistant Professor at Parsons, The New School for Design, brings a keen eye for environmental awareness and design to their work. Her art has garnered support from prestigious institutions like the Graham Foundation and the New York State Council for the Arts. Elizabeth, formerly a professor of media studies, contributes a deep understanding of media, social change, and public pedagogy. Together, they craft immersive experiences that explore Earth’s transformations and humanity’s interconnectedness with the cosmos, epitomizing a vital aesthetic-ecological ethos. Through photography, performative research, multiples, installation and micro-productions, Ellsworth and Kruse continue their vital aesthetic-ecological mission, inviting individuals to engage with the ever-transforming events and conditions of our dynamic world.

Here are their own accounts of their stories.

An Invitation

At OBSERVATORY, our front door sign reads “Geological Cosmo Field Station, Workshop and Tea Hut”, but we don’t actually sell much tea, we mostly serve green tea and you know it isn’t everybody’s thing. Still, people seem to have fun tasting different teas, and encountering surprising flavors and sensations of tea can be transformative. Other than occasionally selling small bags of loose leaf tea and private tastings, we offer tea for free to anyone who comes inside during their open hours. People are sometimes confused by this, the fact that we are not a cafe. This gesture of hospitality ends up becoming an important part of our creative practice because the whole atmosphere inside OBSERVATORY transforms as a result.

When you offer tea for free, it’s no longer a commodity; we’re no longer in a service/customer relationship. Tea is liberated from those limitations and associations, and so are we. Things look different and conversations flow differently because the tea is shared in this way. It has been enjoyable and surprising to feel visitors’ assumptions and expectations shift, and to watch our relationships with each other and with the material of tea and time shift. The ambient energy seems to become more “awake.” People’s ways of speaking, interacting, and tasting seem to be less on autopilot. With this minor shift of offering tea as a free aesthetic experience, much changes very quickly. Different gestures of human exchange and attention arise when the tea is offered without the usual capitalistic associations of “commodity” and “service”.

The teaware also sets the stage for our experiences with tea and with each other. We often use our Tilt of the Earth Teacup (from 2018) for serving tea at OBSERVATORY. It’s a white porcelain tea cup with a rim that tilts at a 23.5° angle—the angle of the Earth’s tilt toward the Sun. It’s a subtle angle, but when you look at the cup, you can see quickly that it makes a graceful bow toward the Sun. When holding the teacup in your hands, it’s easy to imagine holding the Earth and its tilt—an orientation that makes so much possible on our planet. The cup invites an embodied connection between your own human scale and that of the planet through the process of enjoying your tea. From this local, even intimate scale, one can start to consider how the tilt of the Earth shapes seasons, climates, plant and animal life, etc., and how the tilt relates to larger, much more volatile planetary conditions.

It’s interesting to see when offered a tiny cup of tea, people seem to face the cup more directly and focus more on the tea itself, even if only for a few moments. People do slow down and actually taste it. We think this has to do with the small size of our tasting cups. Small portions of tea don’t prevent notable experiences. A traditionally tiny cup of gyokuro tea can be one of the most memorable flavors one has in life. And it’s only about a tablespoon of liquid. Also, teas such as gyokuro are meant to be sipped, rolled around the tongue, savored from front to back of the mouth. It sort of insists: “don’t miss this very ephemeral experience as it’s happening.” The result is a moment of a day that slows down, opens up, and pulls us out of the onslaught. There is respite there.

An Experience

At OBSERVATORY, we will choose the day’s tasting brew according to the ambient atmosphere of the hour and the season. So step into the room, and you’ll find we end up sitting next to the open door and sharing tea with visitors for hours. Although some people just come in for a sip of tea and leave 3 minutes later.

Some guests are into the technical details of where the tea came from and how it was sourced, and others just enjoy the tea itself and have interesting responses to what the tastes remind them of. Four or five times last summer, people tasting the tea suddenly stopped talking and exclaimed something like, “This is incredible,” “What is this? I’ve never tasted anything like it!”

For us, preparing tea each day is a helpful way to see where one’s mind is. Sometimes there’ll be water dripping all over the floor, or the tea can easily get over-brewed if we get distracted. It’s very humbling. Some days we just sit in awe of the flavor and color and are really there for it. There’s something important in this process, about being able to go with, and accept, how different the outcomes can be from day to day.

We keep showing up and creating a context in which to become more intentional with ourselves, and to consider how to share that with our audiences. The learning is endless, and this has been infinitely educational for us. Sharing our own daily ritual of tea making and drinking with others inspires us to bring respectful attention to the tea we make, and to the act of sharing itself.

It’s magical when people seem to stop short and really taste the tea’s connection to the Earth, season, moment—and arrive into their own sensations of the present moment through tea. It has been fulfilling and creative to invite, and potentially set-up such moments.

It’s a bit like dreamtime in terms of what unfolds during those experiences. Awareness becomes heightened. Somehow the process of making and sharing tea in a particular season and in a particular cast of light and air facilitates the participants in “arriving” into the moment and into each other’s presence. The nonhuman materiality of tea leaves transforms into a shared human experience of taste, sight, sound, texture, aroma. We’ve witnessed tea’s ability to spring a contemplative connection among humans, and between humans and tea, over and over, but differently each time. Basically, the formula is to set up an open-ended context, at a small scale of two to four people, where tea is offered as an aesthetic encounter with the forces of sun, earth, wind, fire, water—all within an unrushed sense of time.

Our biggest inspiration actually comes from Baisao, also known as the old tea peddler, who offered outdoor tea to passersby at roadsides in Kyoto in the early 1700s. He was a monk whose life became centered on tea. For him, a practice of tea wasn’t about exclusivity. It was about hospitality for people and respect for the tea as an agent of transformation and inspiration.

We are also inspired by sencha-do, a less formal tea practice than chado. Sencha-do developed as a more inclusive ceremony with fewer prescriptive rules. There’s a more relaxed vibe surrounding the serving of sencha compared to matcha, which they also find meaningful. The idea is to lift the pretense so they can be less self-conscious and simply be with the tea and each other.

An Aesthetic Litmus Test

Art, education, and environmental awareness are present and linked all the time. We don’t see them as separate or think of them as categories. When you’re tasting something, it’s an aesthetic experience, but you’re also “learning” something about the world, your own body, the people who made the tea. In turn, it’s easy to feed a desire to enable the planet and humans to continue making such good tea (which means taking care of farmers, land, air, and water).

We don’t preach about any of these things, but offer up experiences that hopefully make “the environment” immediate, felt, and intimate, even if we offer no overt, direct ecological “lesson.”. Awareness, in the fullest sense of the word, is simultaneously social, political, environmental and aesthetic. The assemblage of artworks, tasting experiences, and performative gestures that we stage at OBSERVATORY activate each of these elements simultaneously.

It’s important to acknowledge that most of our teas come from Japan, though this year we are experimenting with wild grown Chinese and Taiwanese teas. Regardless, we are aware of the ecological and historical/colonial entanglements of tea: its carbon footprint, the human labor involved, impact on land, transportation and shipping. These things are front of mind as we select teas. Given the climate of North America, there is no getting out of the need to source tea from Asia. Still, it’s never taken for granted and we take it seriously.

We are transparent about this and make efforts to share as many details about the teas as possible. It’s very rare, for example, to find tea companies in Japan with women producers or CEOS. So, last summer we did a series of tea tastings celebrating women in tea. We are also starting to collaborate with Cathleen Miller at OBSERVATORY. She is an herbalist in southern Maine who grows her own plants. We now serve her organic herbal tea alongside Japanese teas. Some people aren’t into the caffeine of green teas, especially when we host events in the evening. So we’re having fun collaborating with Cathleen to create an herbal OBSERVATORY blend.

We always serve tea in porcelain, reusable cups. Many of the cups are sourced by our friend, Marie Uno, in Tokyo, from flea markets and antique shops. We call them long life designs, as many of them are over 100 years old and meant to be used in daily life. These humble cups aren’t treated in an overly precious way, but rather respected for their ability to endure. Marie has also done kintsugi repair on our teaware so guests can further appreciate the arts of long life teaware designs, and their long journeys to their hands.

Last summer we had the good fortune of participating in a five-week visual arts residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada. The theme of the residency was Meetings for Teas (we were beyond thrilled about this thematic!). During the residency, and for the past two years as we’ve spent more time in Maine, we focused on developing ways to adapt tea practices and teaware for outdoor field experiences. We’ve been practicing tea while conducting research in remote field sites for many years. But now, given the realities of climate change, we’ve come to see outdoor tea practice as an aesthetic litmus test for what humans are being required to adapt to.

Making tea in the field has been instructive. If you want to honor the tea and the process you’re engaged in, you need to be present with the immediate environmental variables that can make tea brewing challenging: uneven surfaces, wind, exposure to sunlight, weather, sudden change. Making tea outside involves more logistics. You need to have everything required with you. The form can become very flexible of course, but there are still the basic necessities of water, tea and objects to drink from. What constitutes a “good cup of tea” ends up becoming whatever tea becomes, right then and there—because of then and there. That’s been a helpful ecological lesson to learn over and over within many different contexts.

At OBSERVATORY, we plan to share what we are learning about tea as a medium for sensing and signaling volatile environmental contexts and change. We are conducting field research around the Gulf of Maine, one of the fastest warming bodies of water on the planet, and we will stage exhibitions of our field notes in OBSERVATORY’s gallery in the coming months.

In closing, OBSERVATORY extends a warm invitation to all who seek solace, inspiration, and connection. Whether you’re a seasoned tea aficionado or a curious traveler passing through, the Tea Hut awaits, ready to whisk you away on a journey of discovery and delight. So come, sip, and savor the magic of tea at OBSERVATORY—the cosmic waystop along the path of planetary transformation.