Current Show Feature:
Current Show Feature:
Jacqueline Bishop’s Keeper of All The Secrets (Tea Service) displayed in the Parlor Room of the Wickham House at the Valentine Museum, Richmond, VA, 2024
FEBRUARY 20, 2024 – APRIL 21, 2024
AVAILABLE ARTWORKS & EDITIONS
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
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
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
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, 2024Location
Fitzwilliam Museum
Trumpington Street
Cambridge
CB2 1RB
ABOUT
b. 1971, Kingston, Jamaica
lives and works in New York, NY
Jacqueline Bishop is an accomplished writer, academic, and visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, Italy, Cape Verde, Niger, USA, and Jamaica. In addition to her role as Clinical Full Professor at New York University, Jacqueline Bishop was a 2020 Dora Maar/Brown Foundation Fellow in France; 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow in Morocco; and 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow in Paris. Bishop has received several awards, including the OCM Bocas Award for her book “The Gymnast & Other Position”, The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for short story writing, The Arthur Schomburg Award for Excellence in the Humanities from New York University, A James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as several awards from the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission. Jacqueline’s recent ceramic work consists of brightly colored bone China plates used symbolically in Caribbean homes and explores how they hid the violent legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world.
ON HER WORK
My work focuses on making visible the invisible, in making tangible the ephemeral, in speaking aloud the unspoken, and in voicing voicelessness. In so doing, I engage with such themes as pleasure, desire, sexuality, memory and exile (and their concomitant absence, loss, erasure and silence). My practice is interdisciplinary and increasingly trans-disciplinary. As someone who has lived longer outside of my birthplace of Jamaica, than I have lived on the island, I am acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. This ability to see the world from multiple psychological and territorial spaces has led to the development of a particular lens that allows me to view a given environment from a distance. Because I am also a fiction writer and poet as well as a visual artist, the text and narrative are significant parts of my artistic practice.
EXHIBITIONS
OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA?
2024 | Group Exhibition in the Wickham House at the Valentine Museum | Richmond, VA
February 20, 2024 – April 21, 2024
Our America/Whose America? Is a “call and response” exhibition between contemporary artists and historic ceramic objects.
View the exhibition page HERE & View the historic collection HERE
BLACK ATLANTIC: POWER, PEOPLE, RESISTANCE
2023 | Group Exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum | Cambridge, UK
September 8th, 2023 – January 7th, 2024
Which stories get remembered, and why?
This exhibition explores some new stories from history – stories that help us to separate fact from fiction and history from myth.
OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA?
2022 | Group Exhibition at Ferrin Contemporary | North Adams, MA
August 6th, 2022 – October 30th, 2022
Our America/Whose America? Is a “call and response” exhibition between contemporary artists and historic ceramic objects.
View the exhibition page HERE & View the historic collection HERE
CATALOGS
JACQUELINE BISHOP: The Market Woman’s Story Catalog with Video
August 23, 2022 | Published by British Art Studies
Jacqueline Bishop explains her process and approach to her series of 15 plates depicting collages of Jamaican market women throughout history.
View The Market Women’s Story on British Art Studies.
NEWS & MEDIA
Jacqueline Bishop’s The Market Woman’s Story | Jamaican Observer, 2022
In talking to someone recently about the new set of plates I had completed, The Market Woman’s Story, in which I traced the figure of the huckster, higgler, vendor from the period of slavery until today while enveloping her in fruits and flowers, he pointed out that my first collection of poems, Fauna from Peepal Tree Press, had a section that did a similar thing, for in it I was using local Caribbean flowers to tell Jamaican women’s stories. I suddenly realised that I had a long history of using floral imagery to represent female concerns.
For many years I was a closet visual artist, though the work I did produce beginning in primary and high school was always about plants and flowers. I remember once, for example, as a wee thing at John Mills All-Age School, that I got transported while drawing repeatedly the roots of fat sugar cane stalks. It was the most wonderful feeling. Over the years I kept drawing and painting in secret: gigantic blue flowers. But I kept putting visual art to the side all the way through high school and my undergraduate years, though, unfailingly, I would take visual art classes here and there, but never quite centring art in my life. After all, what was one to do with it?
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
Interview with Jacqueline Bishop | Studio Potter, 2023
“From the women in my life, I learned the importance of perseverance and hard work. Having work or being a laborer did not exclude one from being a creative individual. My mother, and my grandmother, were all women who worked outside the home, yet they made the most fabulous art pieces, whether it was patchwork or crotchet. They made a place for me in their homes to draw and paint.”
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE
Free Thinking: Black Atlantic | BBC Sounds, 2023
In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam donated money, literature and art to the University of Cambridge, and the museum which bears his name began. A research project led by New Generation Thinker Jake Subryan Richards has been exploring Cambridge’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and he has curated an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam. Artist and writer Jacqueline Bishop who features in this show, joins Jake and April-Louise Pennant, who has been researching the history of Penrhyn Castle in Wales. Plus, Sherry Davis discusses the rediscovery of Black professionals in East African archaeology.
Producer: Ruth Watts
Black Atlantic: Power, people, resistance runs at the Fitzwilliam until Jan 7th 2024.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE
INQUIRE
Additional works may be available to acquire, but not listed here.
If interested in lists of all works and series: Send us a message
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