Jacqueline Bishop's Fauna acquired for Harris Museum & Art Gallery

Jacqueline Bishop 
Fauna 
2024 
Fine bone China teacup, saucer & sugar bowl glazed with digital transfers 

Sugar bowl: 15.5 x 13cm 
Cup: 10.5 x 5cm 
Saucer: 15.5 x 1cm 

Acquisitions Scheme: Omega Fund 
Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston

We are pleased to announce that the Contemporary Art Society have recently acquired three works from Jacqueline Bishop’s Fauna series for Harris Museum & Art Gallery Preston, as part of this year’s Omega Fund.  

Jacqueline Bishop's interdisciplinary practice centres on revealing the ephemeral, articulating the unspoken, and narrating untold stories to foreground the experiences of the voicelessness. Having spent more time outside her birthplace of Jamaica than on the island itself, Bishop brings a unique perspective to her work, aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. This dual perspective enables her to perceive environments from a distance and navigate various psychological and territorial realms. Additionally for Bishop, who is also a fiction writer and poet, the use of text and narratives – borrowed or authored by herself – plays a prominent role in her artistic process. 

Commissioned by The Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Fauna is a series of porcelainware glazed with digital transfers from Bishop’s own drawings. She then collaborated with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent's former Spode factories, to fully realise the work. The series emerged from Bishop's long-standing inquiry into the role of black women in Caribbean society, particularly their maternal health prior to the abolition of the slave trade. Facing limited options, these women turned to Jamaican plants, flowers, fruits, and herbs for solutions, each containing unique botanical elements that could either terminate unwanted pregnancies or enhance fertility. In Fauna, Bishop surrounds the women and their children with healing and protective herbs, symbolising their connection to nature. One piece depicts a mother offering her child to the natural environment. Bishop considers this commissioned work a visual manifestation of her 2006 collection of poems titled 'Fauna,' which used Caribbean flowers as metaphors to foreground the lives of enslaved women.  

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 its 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.’ Fauna will go on display alongside the aforementioned painting when The Harris re-opens in Spring 2025, playing 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.  

Jacqueline Bishop (b. 1971, Kingston, Jamaica) lives and works in New York and Miami, USA. Recent solo exhibitions include British Art Studies, Paul Mellon Centre, London (2022); SRO Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2018); Meyerhoff Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland (2016). Recent group exhibitions include The Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia; Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Ontario, CA (both 2024); Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2023); Ferrin Contemporary, North Adams, MA (2022); British Ceramics Biennial, Stoke-on-Trent (2021) and Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston (2017).  

Presented by the Contemporary Art Society through the Omega Fund, 2023/24