By Dr. Daniela Fifi

Stunning yet devastating, artist, academic, and writer Jacqueline Bishop’s work challenges visual depictions of colonialism and slavery through her recent collection entitled History at the Dinner Table. In this collection displayed at British Ceramics Biennial, Bishop utilized 18th-century transfer printing techniques to construct vignettes containing imagery of enslaved Africans upon 18 gold-rimmed ceramic plates. 

Bishop highlights the enslaved woman’s experience in her vignettes, focusing on the violence committed against their bodies. In Jamaica, emancipation from colonial slavery was not enacted until 1838. Prior to gaining freedom, enslaved communities grew food on plots of land, exchanging surplus crops via market women, like the one seen below balancing a child on her back and a basket of fruit on her head (see Figure 1). According to Bishop, whose great-grandmother was a market woman, this role is “a constant in Jamaican society. By selling produce [market women] laid the foundation for the peasantry after emancipation” (Fokschaner, 2021, para. 15). Moreover, marketplaces facilitated community formation and self-preservation while helping women to escape the all-too-intrusive gaze of their masters and the law (Sweeney, 2019).

Figure 1

Plate 3. [Mixed media, paint on chinaware]

Plate 3 features a black vendor/forager. She is standing carrying a child wrapped around her torso with a blue and white striped textile as well as a tray of fruits over her head. She is enveloped with large flowers and foliage. It seems she is only supported by nature as the foliage eases the weight of the child behind her and softens the appearance of all she is carrying. Large pieces of green and orange foliage appear to extend from the tray and wrap around her body. She reflects a traditional woman at the marketplace or the roaming vendor. 

Bishop drew upon and digitally altered historical paintings and illustrations of enslaved Africans to construct the vignettes on her plates. She mimicked the transfer printing techniques developed in Stoke-on-Trent, the birthplace of industrialized pottery, to affix the centuries-old imagery onto the plates. 

The Staffordshire “Six Towns” that now constitute Stoke-on-Trent, the location of the British Ceramics Biennial, produced a notable abolitionist in the late 18th century. Josiah Wedgewood, born into a family of potters, spent his early career in England pioneering new production and marketing techniques for earthenware ceramics. With financial success attained through entrepreneurial savviness and early adoption of transfer printing techniques, Wedgewood gained the attention of aristocratic markets and “established a global premium brand that endures today” (Smith, 2015, para. 6). Starting in 1787 until his death in 1795, Wedgewood produced and distributed the Slave Medallion, a ceramic disk featuring “a supplicant slave, kneeling with manacled legs and arms, hands raised beseechingly, and the slogan ‘am I not a man and a brother?’” (Trodd, 2013, p. 340). 

Bishop calls upon this visual narrative below in Plate 6 (see Figure 2). In this design, a person shackled at both the wrists and ankles kneels upon the ground. Their posture indicates a resignation to circumstance, eyes shut to the world around them. This depiction suggests a lack of agency, evoking pity and compassion for the pleading black figure.

Figure 2 

Plate 6. [Mixed media, paint on chinaware]

Plate 6 reflects a somber resolve. A black woman kneels at the center of the image. She is surrounded by oversized flowers with a large watermelon at her feet. The climbing vine of the watermelon shelters, supports and comforts the black slave’s curved back. Her eyes are closed, hands perched on her knees and a flower holds her chin up. The image suggests that nature alone could sense and have compassion for the black slave’s disposition. 

The visual of a kneeling enslaved African is an icon of variable discourse. It is challenged through the lens of commercialization, the disempowerment of the African identity, supplication as transformational, scientific racism, and gratification from pity. Wedgewood’s intention to effect change was quickly publicized and minimized to a fashion statement and a means for sudden commercial profit. Such examples of the visual culture of antislavery constructed the African slave as a passive victim so traumatized by the Middle Passage that the experience effectively destroyed their cultural memory and identity (Trodd, 2013).

Similarly, imagery of enslaved bodies mutilated by their oppressors is criticized for perpetuating what abolitionist Karen Halttunen (1995) coined as the “pornography of pain” (as cited in Trodd, 2013, p. 342). Bishop subverts historical depictions of slavery produced by white abolitionists, critiquing how they “[invite] not solidarity with the enslaved but paternalistic association with the morally righteous abolitionists” (Trodd, 2013, p. 340). Bishop juxtaposes disturbing visual realities with soft overlays of botanical splendors, as seen below in Figure 3. 

Figure 3

Plate 2. [Mixed media, paint on chinaware]

Plate 2 shows an image of a bound and maimed enslaved African woman. Her breasts are uncovered though concealed by large blue flowers. Her entire body is marked by horizontal scars of blood. She is surrounded by large blue, yellow, and pink flowers. Her eyes look upward and reveal a defeat that isn’t welcoming to the viewer. There are two hummingbirds near her head feeding on the flowers. One hummingbird dives into the sweetness of large orchids while another perches itself on a branch. Everything exists as if it were unaware of the enslaved African’s demise. The slave is being consumed by beauty, while being deprived of it.

The enslaved person depicted in Plate 2 looks woefully past their bound hands towards the sky, and is covered with deep wounds left by the lashings of a not pictured oppressor. Her eyes seem to be in search of a divine other, with fists clasped in both prayer and resistance. Bishop juxtaposes their maimed body with a vibrant arrangement of flowers and birds. This is a visual reference to the traditions of Staffordshire bone china pieces, which were often adorned with antiquated floral patterns. Bishop depicts tropical species native to the Caribbean, inspired by “19th-century postcards brought back from Jamaica as souvenirs by visitors” (Fokschaner, 2021, para 6). Artists such as the French engraver Adolphe Duperly who settled in Kingston exoticized and romanticized the stunning Caribbean landscape, satisfying European imaginations about settler-colonial frontiers while omitting the devastation of slavery. Much like these postcards, conventional china consumed as a luxury good by the colonial elite often depicted scenes of tropical splendors. As a young girl, Bishop admired her grandmother’s collection of porcelain plates with “images of carriages, castles and waltzing couples [that] offered glimpses of an exotic, faraway Europe” (Fokschaner, 2021, para 10). Through her work she hopes to call attention to the fact that the very consumers of these plates accumulated their wealth through the history of slavery on the sugar plantations.

Bishop’s work also engages with historian Zoe Trodd’s plea for “a living protest legacy” in art (2013, p. 351). In her scholarship Trodd conveys that the use of 19th century British and American antislavery visual culture undermines a true abolitionist intent. Modern artists are challenged to consult with this history and its visual culture without repeating its paternalistic references: the kneeling, supplicant slave, the slave ship, the auction block, the scourged back. Trodd explains that artists “should continue turning to the antislavery past, but seek there an aesthetic of freedom and engage in a radical bricolage that transforms ideas, images, language, cultural representations and political acts into a living protest legacy” (2013, p. 351, emphasis in original).

Perhaps the flowers and foliage that envelope the figure above in Plate 2 symbolize a type of rebellion, protection, beauty, and freedom. In this way Bishop’s History at the Dinner Table may succeed in achieving Trodd’s vision for a “living protest legacy.”

The medium and imagery of History at the Dinner Table confront colonial and abolitionist depictions of Jamaica and slavery in the 19th century. The inclusion of Bishop’s work in the British Ceramics Biennial and at SET Centre CIO (2021) invites new perspectives that challenge picturesque visual aesthetics born under colonialism, unspoiled by the grotesque realities of slavery.

View the collection of plates by Jacqueline Bishop here.

Photography credit: Jenny Harper Photography

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bishop, J. History at the Dinner Table [Exhibition]. (2021). British Ceramics Biennial, Staffordshire, UK. https://www.britishceramicsbiennial.com/event/history-at-the-dinner-table/

Fokschaner, S. (2021, September 10). Indelicate truths – an artist’s depiction of slavery on fine china. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/51936c59-d58b-4aa4-a036-0353e69536f0.

Halttunen, K. (1995). Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture. The American Historical Review, 100(2), 303–334. https://doi.org/10.2307/2169001

Sweeney, S. J. (2019). Market Marronage: Fugitive Women and the Internal Marketing System in Jamaica, 1781–1834. The William and Mary Quarterly, 76(2), 197–222. https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.76.2.0197

Smith, S. S. (2015, January 7). Josiah Wedgewood Spun Artistry Into Commodity Innovate: He industrialized the making of fine pottery. Investor’s Business Daily, A4.Trodd, Z. (2013). Am I still not a man and a brother? Protest memory in contemporary antislavery visual culture. Slavery & Abolition, 34(2), 338–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2013.791172

Dr. Daniela Fifi

drdanielafifi.com

Arts & Education is a quarterly column by Dr. Daniela Fifi, that interviews leading professionals in the arts and cultural sector to provide industry insight into the field. This column also offers Arts Education program reviews and exhibition essays as content support for Arts Educators. The column is intended for young aspirant and emerging professionals who wish to enter the fields of arts education, curation, and/or arts administration.

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