Tea, Memory and Liberation in Clay:
In Conversation with Contemporary Ceramic Artist Morel Doucet

“This project seeks to restore balance. To say: our tea histories matter too. Our infusions, our ceremonies, our resistance—they belong in the museum, not just in the margins.”

Miami-based, Haitian-born artist Morel Doucet has created two new remarkable works in response to the Chitra Collection, a museum dedicated to the history of tea. The two teapots entitled Pearl of the Antilles: Sugarcane and Tea and Ayiti en Bleu: The Songbird Sings a Reverie of Liberation (2025) are the first contemporary ceramics commissioned for the collection. Rich in symbolic meaning, the works interrogate the significance of tea in Haiti, and its conflicting associations. Tea was intimately connected to the sugar trade, colonialism and enslavement, however following the Haitian Revolution, herbal infusions came to be seen as sources of spirituality and healing. As Morel states, the two teapots “represent duality: the colonial and the post-colonial, the oppressor and the oppressed, the exported and the exiled.” In June 2025, over video chat, Chitra Collection curator Evelyn Earl spoke to Morel about his work and this momentous acquisition for the museum.

Can you tell us about the inspiration behind this commission and your creative process?

As a multidisciplinary artist, I use ceramics, illustration, and printmaking to excavate buried histories. My pieces are often richly textured, imbued with narrative fragments, and situated in a diasporic dialogue that transcends borders. This commission is rooted in personal, collective, and ancestral memories.

I was moved by the idea of crafting vessels not just to hold tea, but to carry stories. Pearl of the Antilles and Ayiti en Bleu are both homage and critique, tracing the intimacy of ritual while unearthing the violence buried in empire. As a Haitian-born artist, my identity is braided into the narrative of resistance. Haiti—the first Black republic, born of revolution—reminds me daily that resistance is a creative act. My ancestry is steeped in spiritual resilience, storytelling, and a fierce relationship to land and sea. From lakou (communal spaces) to the rhythmic patterns in Vodou flags, Haitian culture emphasizes the sacred and communal. These values pulse through my work. I also draw from the aesthetics of Kreyòl visual traditions, which embrace bright color, layered symbolism, and tactile detail.

This commission gave me the chance to explore how the quiet elegance of tea culture – often associated with refinement- intersects with brutal colonial histories. In that tension, I saw an opening. A chance to create something tender, subversive, and layered with meaning.

Why was it important to you for this work to be formed as two teapots?

The teapot is deceptive in its charm. It invites closeness, civility, even comfort. But that surface gentleness often conceals centuries of exploitation. The decision to craft two teapots was deliberate. I wanted them to be in dialogue, mirrors of each other, yet distinct in identity.

They represent duality: the colonial and the post-colonial, the oppressor and the oppressed, the exported and the exiled. The blue teapot represents liberation – thinking about a better tomorrow. The bird specifically, that sits atop the teapot, evokes the idea of flight and with that, freedom. In Haitian culture, duality is sacred. Our cosmology embraces both light and shadow, spirit and matter. The teapots speak to that rhythm, both a reckoning and a reverence.

What drew you to ceramics as a medium?

The materiality of clay, in particular, allows me to echo the fragility of human life and the precarity of the earth. It also connects me to ancestral traditions of making, those passed down quietly, often in resistance to violence and displacement. Clay has memory. It holds pressure, remembers your touch. That intimacy drew me in. Ceramics allow me to build with both precision and vulnerability. I work with slab construction, hand-building, and intricate surface design techniques that echo both colonial craft traditions and Afro-Caribbean folk practices.

What I love is the paradox: ceramics are fragile yet eternal. That’s the tension I’m always chasing.

Can you tell us about the colours you chose for the glazes and their significance for you – I know white has already played an important role in your work, particularly in the White Noise series…

White is never neutral. In White Noise, I used it as both a mask and a canvas, symbolizing silence, erasure, and the blinding force of institutional whiteness. It was about what gets sanitized in the telling of history, especially when Black narratives are “cleansed” to fit palatable frames. In this new commission, the whites are softer, less clinical. They whisper rather than shout. But still, they hold tension between purity and absence, between what’s visible and what’s buried.

The blue in Ayiti en Bleu was chosen to echo the Caribbean sea, yes, but also the indigo that once stained enslaved bodies. Blue becomes a balm, a bruise, and a horizon all at once.

Together, the red and blue also evoke the Haitian flag, which carries a profound history of resistance and reclamation. The flag was born by tearing the white from the French tricolor, an act that symbolized rejecting colonial domination and oppression. The blue and red, sewn back together, represent unity and strength—of enslaved Africans reclaiming their identity and asserting agency over their lives. In these colors lies a story of defiance, freedom, and the power to reshape one’s destiny, much like the craftsmanship of these teapots.

Can you expand upon the complex history of tea in Haiti and its connection to colonial contexts?

Tea in Haiti isn’t just a beverage, it’s an archive. Under French colonial rule, Haitian land and labor were exploited for luxury commodities like sugar, coffee, and indigo, all of which were exported to feed European tea rituals. Tea time, that genteel pastime, was built atop Haitian blood. Following independence, Haitian herbal infusions such as thé zanmann (anise tea) or thé citronnelle became integral to everyday survival and spiritual practice. They’re healing, restorative, and passed down matrilineally. Yet even these face erasure as globalized tea culture privileges European traditions.

This project seeks to restore balance. To say: our tea histories matter too. Our infusions, our ceremonies, our resistance—they belong in the museum, not just in the margins.

I would love to hear more about what inspires you about Haiti – I understand its flora and fauna were key to developing the ornamentation for the teapots?

Growing up in Haiti, I lived on a farm with my grandfather, so we were always surrounded by corn, sugar cane – and whenever someone was sick, we would go out and gather the different leaves from the mountain to make tea. In American culture they would call this ‘bush medicine’.

Haiti’s landscape is a poetry of contrasts, resilient, vibrant, but often scarred. The flora and fauna are like ancestors: each plant has a story, each bird a hymn. From the endangered Hispaniolan trogon to the humble bwa kannèl (cinnamon tree), I see beauty and resistance coded in nature. The teapots are adorned with these botanical motifs—not as decorative flourishes, but as testaments. Ornamentation, in this sense, becomes a language of reverence. I want viewers to feel the pulse of the island in every petal and vine. These forms root the work in Haitian soil, even as it enters a global institution.

In previous works, I’ve depicted flora and fauna native to threatened ecosystems, entangled with human forms or marked by scars. These are not just symbols of decay—they’re signals, warning beacons about the cost of inaction. As an artist, I can’t fix the environment alone. But I can shift the conversation, make it visible, make it felt. And in doing so, I hope to empower viewers to move from awareness to advocacy.

This acquisition project was originally sparked when we, the curators at the Chitra Collection, first saw and were inspired by your work Tea with the Queen Reparations (2019) and your ‘Rococo’ teapot collection. The form reminded us of our historic collection: eighteenth-century porcelain produced by the Dehua kilns in China, known for its pure white surface and applied floral decoration, much imitated by European potters in Meissen and Britain. Can you tell us a bit about this earlier work, and perhaps how it relates to the 2025 commission?

Tea with the Queen Reparations was satire and ceremony rolled into one. It asked: What would reparations look like if served at the table of empire? It considered the issue of Haiti having to pay France a compensation for the loss of revenue from Haitian sugarcane plantations. The debt is estimated to have cost Haiti over $20 billion, with resources diverted from investments in areas like infrastructure and schooling. The Rococo teapots’ florid, excessive aesthetic mirrored the tastes of colonial Europe while embedding subversive symbols: broken chains, sugarcane, Haitian flora.

This new commission is more elegiac, more ancestral. Where the 2019 works were biting, these are softer, more introspective. They honor not just resistance but survival. They ask not only what was taken but what endures. There’s still critique, yes but also deep love.

Can you tell us how your work as an arts educator intersects with or inspires your creative practice?

Teaching is a form of art in itself. As an educator, I’m constantly unpacking history, challenging assumptions, and inviting critical engagement. My students, many of whom carry diasporic identities, remind me of art’s power to affirm, to provoke, to heal. That dialogue seeps into my studio. It keeps me accountable. It pushes me to create work that isn’t just visually compelling but intellectually and emotionally urgent. Education makes my art porous, open to new interpretations, new voices, new futures.

It is clear that social, economic and political histories have proven a great source of inspiration for you. Do you ever get inspiration from other artists or objects that you encounter?

I draw inspiration from Haitian sequin flags, Yoruba sculpture, and Victorian mourning jewelry. Artists like Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, and Edouard Duval-Carrié have influenced my thinking on how to use form to hold both grief and defiance. Objects, too, especially colonial teaware, slave-made ceramics, and Caribbean devotional artifacts. They whisper of lives lived between brutality and beauty. I try to listen.

Collaboration is the lifeblood of my studio. I see it as an echo of African diasporic traditions where art is not created in isolation but in communion. Working with other artists, fabricators, and cultural workers helps me expand the vocabulary of my pieces.

Finally, it would be great to reflect on the significance of this acquisition for the museum – the first ceramic commission for the Chitra Collection. What role do you think contemporary artists have to play in helping audiences to grapple with the complex, often colonial, histories represented by museum collections?

As a contemporary artist, having the opportunity to create work for a collection and respond to it is like a lifelong dream.

Contemporary artists are translators of memory. We reframe the past not to rewrite it, but to re-center the voices it ignored. Museums are finally beginning to reckon with their colonial legacies, and we can help push that conversation forward. This commission, being the first ceramic commission in the Chitra Collection, matters deeply. It’s not just about adding diversity. It’s about rewriting the narrative arc. Pearl of the Antilles and Ayiti en Bleu aren’t just vessels, they are witness, offering, and invocation.

We, as artists, hold mirrors to history, but we also hold lanterns. We illuminate what was hidden. And sometimes, we even offer paths toward repair.