ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

As part of our public programme Time, Space and Empire – a multi-site, cross-arts programme of artist commissions, installations, talks and films that explore the imperial history of Stoke-on-Trent and Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site – Culture& is working with the V&A Wedgwood Collection on a display of ceramic works by contemporary artist Jacqueline Bishop. The artwork is a 13-piece porcelain table service called The Keeper of All the Secrets based on a well-known Caribbean image, the Market Woman. It combines historic botanical illustration and depictions of enslaved West Africans and Indigenous people.

ABOUT TIME, SPACE AND EMPIRE

Culture& is excited to launch Time, Space and Empire (2024-2025), a multi-site, cross-arts programme exploring the concepts of time, space, and the development of Britain’s sea power during the expansion of its former empire in relation to the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site in Southeast London and the Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.

Programmes include artist interventions in heritage sites, working with community-led organisations to empower underrepresented audiences, and creating research opportunities for diverse talents. The project will also explore how the colonial economy brought changes to what was consumed and considered to be ‘good taste’.

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FEATURED ARTWORK

PROGRAMMING

ABOUT JACQUELINE BISHOP

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

INSTALLATION IMAGES

Sienna Patti Contemporary’s summer exhibition features the work of four female artists whose work is deeply personal yet universally relatable. How will we be remembered? Will the memories be truthful? What role do we play in shaping that truth?

Melanie Bilenker‘s detailed work starts with the artist photographing herself at home and then painstakingly rendering it using her hair as the line. Hairwork, an intimate art form, was commonly used to commemorate a loved one, especially during Victorian times. Bilenker gives it a modern twist, immortalizing herself, or at least the impression of herself—a hand lightly touching a mirror. The artist is there, just out of sight. She has made lasting a single short moment. 

Jacqueline Bishop, whose interdisciplinary practice is research-based, is acutely aware of being both an insider and an outsider, having lived longer outside her birthplace of Jamaica than on the island itself. This perspective allows her to view an environment from a distance. Bishop’s series of porcelain plates, Fauna, are showcased in this exhibition alongside a tea set titled The Keeper of All The Secrets, featuring the well-known Caribbean image of the Market Woman. Through collage and porcelain, Bishop weaves together histories of the British Empire, Colonialism, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Venetia Dale also draws from history, collecting recent and antique unfinished embroideries and piecing them together to create tapestries that tell a new story. By stitching together unfinished moments of care and attention, the final embroideries link the labor of these anonymous creators at their points of pause. “I am a mother and the keeper of time in my family,” writes Venetia Dale. “By making space in my work to celebrate a pause or a fleeting gesture of care, these sculptural works become a monument to my labor as well as to the labor of those who came before me.”

In Lauren Kalman‘s recent series To Hold, plaster castings of the artist’s body are made and imprinted onto a blown glass vessel. With multiple assistants manipulating body parts, the plaster castings function like puppets, acting as a proxy for the body pressed against the molten glass. The carefully controlled form of the blown glass vessel is lost with the imprint of the body, leaving both a permanent distortion of the original form and a lasting imprint of the absent body. The To Have and To Hold series is made of wheel-thrown ceramic vessels distorted by holding them against the artist’s actual body – no casting needed. The imprint implies she was once there, the heavy vessel cradled in her arms.