'Mehr' Tea Box in Printed Wood

Provenance

The Mehr tea box belongs to the North Indian tradition of decorative woodware — wooden forms treated with surface print and sealed under a waterproof finish to produce objects that are functional and decorative in equal measure. Each box is individually cut and worked in wood, its surface printed with an ornamental pattern and sealed under lacquer. The tradition comes from workshops in Delhi NCR and western Uttar Pradesh, where artisans adapt the vocabulary of India's painted and lacquered woodwork to contemporary domestic storage forms.

The surface print on Mehr draws from the vocabulary of the Persian carpet tradition — the repeating field pattern, the organised border, the dense ornamental ground that characterises the classic carpet composition. The carpet's visual language travelled from Persia into the Mughal court and thence into Indian decorative tradition broadly: the same compositional principles that organise a Mughal court carpet organise the block-printed textiles of Sanganer, the printed borders of Kashmiri shawls, and the surface decoration of Indian lacquered objects. Mehr in Persian names the sun, warmth, and love — the quality of warmth that the carpet tradition has always associated with the inhabited interior, the surface underfoot and around the hand.

The waterproof surface makes this wooden tea box suited to everyday counter use for tea bag storage and display. Each piece is individually handcrafted; print placement and colour tone may vary slightly between pieces.

Disclaimer

• These pieces are handcrafted in wood with a printed surface. Variations in tone and colour are a natural feature of the process.
• Minor differences in print registration or surface texture should be understood as the signature of individual craft, not a defect.