JACQUELINE BISHOP

AVAILABLE ARTWORKS & EDITIONS

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

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

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
2024
Jamaican lacebark (chemise), 11 x hessian small sugar sacks with appliqué and embroidery; chemise: small woman’s size
~16 x 10″

Currently on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum in “Rise Up! Resistance, Revolution, Abolition”

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
February 21 – June 1, 2025

NANA

In 2023, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Accra, Ghana. Although I had previously visited Africa, living in Morocco as a Fulbright Fellow, this was my first time in West Africa and a country where my ancestry DNA test indicated direct lineage. The weeks I spent in Ghana were powerful, starting with the drive from the airport where vendors moved through traffic selling goods, much like in my native Jamaica. The market women outside my hotel, effortlessly balancing baskets on their heads, reminded me of my great-grandmother and grandmother, both formidable market women.

At a slave site, I wrapped my arms around myself and thought of the nameless faceless ancestor of mine, who had been at a place like this. I shivered as I thought of her in a horrendous ship’s hold, then imagined as she stumbled out on the other side of the Atlantic balancing a basket on her head. When my market woman forebear arrived in Jamaica, she was allotted a small plot of land to grow food to feed herself and her progeny. In time, she exchanged or sold the excess food grown in weekend markets which led to the development of an internal, and subsequently an external, marketing system. The market woman is one of the most direct links to our West African forebears. She has become my muse.

It was slavery, sugar and sugarcane cultivation which brought the West African to the plantation societies of the Caribbean. In one part of the work that I am presenting here, I have embroidered and appliqued images of Caribbean market women on West Indian sugar sacks [41]. In doing I hope to show that despite the inhumanity of the plantation system, these women maintained agency and autonomy, particularly as needleworkers and seamstresses, privileged positions within plantation society. Black needleworkers not only met the clothing needs of the enslaved but also earned extra income, empowering themselves.

On one of the sacks there is an exchange of knowledge and information between a West African market woman and an Indigenous woman. This work represents the intimate ties between the Indigenous and West African groups that met in Caribbean societies where both shared botanical and medical knowledge. The work Nana is meant to represent the meeting of indigeneity and West African knowledge systems on the island of Jamaica. To illustrate my point, I will tell a little story. One day I was talking to my uncle Moses about my great grandmother Celeste, a market woman par excellence. This time, however, instead of talking about my great-grandmother’s marketing skills, I was talking about her immense knowledge of Jamaican herbs and bushes. I mentioned to my uncle that I remembered hearing as a child that my great-grandmother delivered babies. My uncle corrected me and said it was Celeste’s friend who delivered the babies, but my great-grandmother assisted because, as a market woman, she knew all the herbs and bushes to aid in the process.

I was intrigued.

“What about mid-wives?” I wanted to know.

“They did not exist”, my uncle answered. “What you had instead were Nanas. And that isn’t even an English word. That word sounds ‘African’ to me.”

I was even more intrigued.

The area where my family hails from is home to a legendary freedom fighter and to date Jamaica’s sole female National Heroine. Her name is Grandy Nanny. I began to see where her name came from. For you see Grandy Nanny too was a Nana, a herbalist, a botanist, a woman born in West Africa, transported to Jamaica who refused to submit to slavery and became a fighting Maroon and subsequently a mother of all Jamaica’s children.

Inspired, I conceptualized a ‘Nana blouse’ to honour market women, Jamaica’s botanical legacy, Grandy Nanny, my great-grandmother, and other influential women [41]. Using an enslaved chemise as a prototype, I incorporated lacebark, a material from the Lagetta lagetto tree, native to Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola. This fine netting was used in Victorian times to make various products. Embroidered on sugar sacks surrounding the chemise are herbs used by Nanas for birthing and fertility control during enslavement and afterward. This patchwork marries Indigenous and West African botanical knowledge, reflecting the roots of Caribbean culture.

Through my work, I aim to show that despite the brutal realities of slavery, market women and needleworkers retained some control over their lives, contributing to the cultural and economic fabric of their societies. These women, both historically and in my family, exemplify resilience and agency, shaping the legacy of Caribbean and African heritage.

–Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop
The Narratives of Migration (set of 10)
2024
digital print on porcelain, gold lustre
11 x 11 x .5″ (each)

THE NARRATIVES OF MIGRATION

The series of plates derives its title from a poem I wrote which traces various migrations within my family. As a child growing up on the island of Jamaica, I never knew my mother’s father, but I knew that he lived in England where he had another family. My mother and her brother– his children– were left back on the island of Jamaica. 

Jamaica’s relationship with England began in 1655 when, having failed to wrest Cuba from Spain, the English settled on Jamaica as a secondary prize. While I grew up in an independent country (achieved from England in 1962) England still loomed large in my consciousness as a child born in the 1970s. Even today, the British Monarch remains Head of State of Jamaica, which is part of the Commonwealth. 

In this work, it is both my family’s history and a larger English/Jamaican history that I have sought to trace. These plates consist of family photographs of my grandmother, my mother, and my mother’s brother in Jamaica, and my grandfather, his wife, and my aunts in England. They reference the recent Windrush scandal whereby British citizens from the Caribbean living in the UK for decades were being deported back to the Caribbean, and they tell a longer story of enslavement. Replete are images of the flora and fauna of the Caribbean which would be taken from the island to fill English gardens and give rise to the field of Natural history. Also included are the icons of nationalism developed for Jamaica by the British. 

What these plates show is that in both personal and political terms, the relationship between Jamaica and the UK is one that is enduring.  

-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
Recently acquired by the Williams College Museum of Art, Fall 2023.

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