JACQUELINE BISHOP

AVAILABLE ARTWORKS & EDITIONS

Jacqueline Bishop
Fauna (Cup & Saucer, Sugar Pot)
2024
digital print on porcelain, gold lustre
various dimensions

Recently acquired by the Harris Museum, April 2024

FAUNA

Jacqueline Bishop’s interdisciplinary practice is focused on making visible the ephemeral, in speaking aloud the unspoken, in telling untold stories and voicing voicelessness. Bishop is acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider having lived longer outside of her birthplace of Jamaica than on the island itself. This has allowed her to view a given environment from a distance.

Fauna arises out of Bishop’s long-standing questions about the position of black women in Caribbean society. Her first collection of poems published in 2006, also titled ‘Fauna’, used Caribbean flowers as metaphors to explore the lives of enslaved women. Bishop sees this new commissioned work as a visual manifestation of these poems. Further research revealed that prior to the ending of the slave trade there was no attention given to either the maternal health of pregnant women or their babies.

Where and to whom did enslaved women turn when they were trying to conceive, could not conceive or found themselves with unwanted pregnancies? The answer lay in the plants, flowers, fruits and herbs of Jamaica. Each one contained a unique botanical element that could either end an unwanted pregnancy or encourage fertility. In Fauna Bishop has surrounded the women and their children with healing and protective herbs. Indeed, in one case, the mother is offering her child up to the arms of the natural environment.

Fauna was commissioned by The Harris and will go on display when the museum re-opens in Spring 2025. Unveiling overlooked and brutal histories of slavery and colonialism, Bishop’s work is an important acquisition for The Harris’ ceramic collection. Creating dialogues with other pieces in The Harris’ collection, most importantly an oil painting recently identified as ‘A Jamaica Landscape’ (c. 1774), attributed to George Robertson, Bishop said that her work “intervenes in the idyllic presentation of slavery and enslavement of the painting to present enslaved women using the environment to shield themselves and their children. Both works speak to each other.” Both works will be displayed together as this timely acquisition will play an integral part in a new display exploring the global history of tea, weaving together histories of British Empire, Colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

-The Harris Museum

Jacqueline Bishop
Keeper of All The Secrets
2023
digital print on commercial porcelain
various dimensions
1/3 edition

Currently on view in Richmond, Virginia as part of Ferrin Contemporary’s exhibition, Our America/Whose America?, on view through April 21st, 2024

KEEPER OF ALL THE SECRETS

Jacqueline Bishop’s tea service, The Keeper of All The Secrets continues her series of porcelain plates, tableware and textiles based on the most known Caribbean image, the Market Woman. The first works in the series, a series of plates History at the Dinner Table was followed by The Market Woman’s Story. 

These works draw from deep research into the role and position of black women in Caribbean society and their images in paintings, prints and photography. The Market Woman first crossed the Atlantic from West Africa as an enslaved individual and played a critical role in Atlantic World societies. Using the source imagery, Bishop’s collages weave together histories of the British Empire, Colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The porcelain tea service, The Keeper of All The Secrets and Fauna intentionally use the forms themselves to make the point that enslavement, colonialism and the trade economy of sugar, tea and slavery which gave rise to luxury commodities, were enjoyed and enjoined in the colonies and Europe. The forms: teapots, cups, saucers, cream pitchers, and sugar pots use the collaged images in overglaze print transfers on fine china, outlined by hand in gold and silver. Combining historic botanical imagery with depictions of enslaved West Africans and Indigenous people, The Keeper of All The Secrets focuses on the moment when the enslaved woman met the Indigenous woman to exchange information and knowledge of botanicals. Fauna portrays women with their children surrounded by the floral botanicals that were used to protect them. 

-Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop
The Market Woman’s Story
2022
digital print on commercial porcelain
8.75 x 12.25 x 1″ (each)
set of 15 plates
1/3 edition

THE MARKET WOMAN’S STORY

On one hand, the market woman/huckster is the most ubiquitous figure to emerge from plantation Jamaica. Yet, as pervasive as the figure of the market woman is in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, she remains critically overlooked.

In this set of fifteen dishes, I am both paying homage to the market woman – centering her importance to Caribbean society from the period of slavery onwards – placing her within a critical context. In particular, I place the market woman within a long tradition of female labor depicted in diverse imagery that I have sourced online, including early Jamaican postcards, paintings of enslaved women from Brazil, the colonial paintings of the Italian Agostino Brunias, and present-day photographs, which I collage alongside floral and abolitionist imagery.

I work in ceramics because all the women around me as I grew up – my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother – cherished ceramic dinner plates. These were centerpieces kept in one of their most important acquisitions, a specially made mahogany cabinet. To fabricate the plates, it is important that I am working with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent in the former Spode factories. In the realization of the series, that connection imbues them with a meaning that shows the long and enduring relationship between England and Jamaica.

My hope in doing this work is to give much respect to the market women of the Jamaican and larger Atlantic world who have fed, and continue to feed, nations. The market woman is the defining symbol of Jamaica and Caribbean societies.

-Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop
History at the Dinner Table
2021
digital print on commercial porcelain
11″ diameter (each)
1 / 3 edition

HISTORY AT THE DINNER TABLE

As a little girl growing up on the island of Jamaica, Jaqueline Bishop’s grandmother had a large mahogany cabinet where she kept some of her most prized possessions: her bone china crockery. These delicate pieces were painted with bright, cheerful images of palaces and carriages and were only used on special occasions. 

As beautiful as these china dishes were, they often hid a violent history of slavery and colonialism by European countries. In ‘History at the Dinner Table’, Jaqueline changes the story by showing the legacy of slavery on the dishes instead. Despite their violent history, Bishop is also seduced and charmed by the delicacy and beauty of bone chinaware and she has sought to produce dishes equally as beautiful as the ones made by major European centers of bone china production. The work is exhibited in mahogany cabinets as mahogany was once a major luxury import from Jamaica to England.

–British Ceramics Biennial, in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK

“Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance”
Featuring Jacqueline Bishop’s, “History at the Dinner Table”
On view through January 7, 2024

Location
Fitzwilliam Museum
Trumpington Street
Cambridge
CB2 1RB

Listen to the interview on the BBC