Work by Postgraduate Researcher Jacqueline Bishop on display at Fitzwilliam Museum and Royal Museums Greenwich
Artist, academic, writer and Postgraduate Researcher Jacqueline Bishop is exhibiting works in two separate exhibitions in Cambridge and London.
Jacqueline Bishop is based in the USA and Jamaica, and is currently researching Jamaican women’s decorative and ornamental textile traditions as part of a PhD within the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.
Bishop’s recent work celebrates the countless unrecorded Jamaican market women of West African heritage whose skills, knowledge and empowerment ‘exemplify resilience and agency’ and helped ‘shape the legacy of Caribbean and African heritage’. She is also the author of several books and oral histories relating to the history of Jamaica.
Jacqueline is presenting her new work Nana (2024) as part of the exhibition Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Running to 1 June, the exhibition explores the multifaceted history of the fight to end transatlantic slavery through the stories of the people, communities and anti-slavery movements who campaigned for abolition in the face of oppression and opposition.
Jacqueline Bishop, Nana, 2024. Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition exhibition, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Photograph by Sophia Patel.
Bishop's ceramic work The Keeper of All The Secrets has been acquired by the Royal Museums Greenwich and is also currently on display in the Queen’s House.
It reworks a traditional British tea service, using collages of Caribbean market women and botanicals to explore women’s agency and the legacies of empire and enslavement.
The market woman is a recognisable yet overlooked figure in Caribbean society since the time of slavery who also features in Jacqueline Bishop’s doctoral research about the cultural history of black women and Jamaican textiles.
Jacqueline Bishop’s The Keeper of All The Secrets, 2023. This set is number 3 in an edition of 3. Photograph © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Jacqueline Bishop said:
“Both my creative and critical practices are focused on making visible the ephemeral, in speaking aloud the unspoken, in telling untold stories and voicing voicelessness. As such paying critical attention to this most recognisable figure from the Caribbean is long overdue.
“I am especially moved that the curator at Queen’s House worked to produce a first art history book on the market woman. As the great granddaughter and granddaughter of Jamaican market women, this is all so moving for me.”
Saucer for a teacup from Jacqueline Bishop’s contemporary ceramic art work The Keeper of All The Secrets: a 13-piece traditional British tea service decorated with Bishop’s collages of Caribbean market women. Photo © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Dr Will Rea is one of Jacqueline Bishop’s PhD supervisors in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, alongside Dr Claudia Sternberg. Will Rea said:
“Jacqueline Bishop has, over time, consolidated an art practice that has questioned the basis of identity within the Atlantic world.
“Her work has looked to the barbarity of slavery, but placed it within the everyday and the quotidian, a set of plates, the use of ribbons and textiles. In her work, unexpected juxtapositions force a concentration on the often-hidden realities of the slave trade and the ways in which its normalisation took place in both Europe and the Caribbean.
“Her PhD work has gone further in developing an understanding of the ways in which Jamaican identity is developed from of a patchwork of communities. Her work looks to rediscover narratives of identity that have been hidden, disguised and masked by colonial rhetoric.
“In her work, she traces figures and themes – from the market woman to botanical specimens – to develop new understandings of Jamaican modernism and the place of art within that nation.”
Creamer from Jacqueline Bishop’s contemporary ceramic art work The Keeper of All The Secrets: a 13-piece traditional British tea service decorated with Bishop's collages of Caribbean market women. Photo © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich,
Dr Claudia Sternberg said:
“Jacqueline is an accomplished and prolific artist and researcher whose creative works have attracted considerable interest in British institutions in recent years.
“In her doctoral research to date she has made important connections between indigenous and African practices and knowledge in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.
“Over the past few years, Jacqueline has also assembled a series of unique textile artefacts which not only inform her doctoral thesis but constitute a fascinating collection in their own right. We hope that it will be brought to further attention beyond the current research.”
More information
Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition runs from 1 February to 1 June at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RB
See Jacqueline Bishop’s The Keeper of All the Secrets at the Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich.
Find out about The Keeper of All The Secrets: Ceramic Art, Botanicals and the Caribbean Market Woman, a new book by Victoria Lane, Errol Francis, Angela Billings and Jacqueline Bishop, published by Royal Museums Greenwich as part of the Spotlight Series.
Feature image
Jacqueline Bishop, Nana, 2024. Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition exhibition, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Photograph by Sophia Patel.
