Teapot from 'The Keeper of All The Secrets'

CONTENT WARNING: Please note this description references abortion, sexual abuse and historic enslavement.

This teapot is part of a contemporary ceramic art work 'The Keeper of All The Secrets' which takes the form of a 13-piece traditional British tea service. Other parts include a sugar bowl, creamer and five cups and saucers. The tea service is decorated with Jacqueline Bishop's collages of Caribbean market women.

'The Keeper of All The Secrets' speaks to themes of the tea and sugar trades, empire and enslavement and female agency. It provides an intersection through which contemporary debates on the present-day impacts of colonialism, empire and the position of women can be examined.

The piece focuses on images of the Caribbean market woman, who is one of the most ubiquitous figures of plantation visual culture but has been critically overlooked. Market women are part of Jacqueline Bishop’s maternal ancestry, as both her grandmother and great-grandmother performed this role. She views this work as a celebration of the market woman's unrecognised status in Caribbean culture from the times of enslavement to the present day and describes how her work is centred on ‘making visible the invisible, in making tangible the ephemeral, in speaking aloud the unspoken, and in voicing voicelessness.’

The market woman performed an illicit resistance to the system of enslavement. Through her knowledge of the properties of the plants and flowers and her ability to move about islands, going to and from markets, she could secretly regulate menstrual cycles or illegally assist in unwanted pregnancies, many of which are known to be the result of rape by enslavers. In this way, Bishop asserts the market woman was able to assist women in controlling their reproductive processes which was part of the reason for the low birth rate in the British West Indies.

Intertwined with the market women on the tea service are various abortifacient plants, such as cotton root along with sugar used to make the drink that would engender the abortions. Sugar was also an integral part of the history of enslavement. Using such imagery on the gold embellished tea service situates it within the discourses of Caribbean enslavement and also the tea trade. This encompasses the extractive activities of the East India Company, the Opium Wars, British consumerism around both tea and ceramics and our British cultural and economic identity. In conflating the colonial sites of production of the raw materials with the domestic sites of their consumption, 'The Keeper of All the Secrets' also alludes to the history and culture of tea-drinking as a space of female agency.

The central image on the teapot of 'The Keeper of All The Secrets' represents the origin story of the Caribbean market woman in which a West African woman of Brazil, taken from a nineteenth-century print reaches out to an Indigenous woman from a seventeenth-century engraving of the French Antilles. Their juxtaposition collapses time, blending identities to reveal alternative possibilities for bodies in a single (post-)colonial location. The women are
collaged together and symbolically connected through the flowers of the cassava plant (Manihot esculenta). Cassava leaves and stems are known abortion-inducing substances. The scene signifies the mutual transfer between and linkage of cultures, even after most Indigenous
peoples were subjugated or eradicated by colonisers.

The tea service uses a 'readymade' white blank set. The artist worked with the ceramicist Emma Price to create the work. Bishop has stated the importance of how the figures of the market women move about in the white space of the ceramic, which acts as a metaphor for the dislocation she experiences as a member of the African diaspora. This set is number 3 in an edition of 3. It has the mark 'Jacqueline Bishop: The Keeper of All The Secrets': 2023: 3/3' on the bottom of the teapot.