Teacup saucer from 'The Keeper of All The Secrets'

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

This saucer for a teacup 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. The set includes a teapot, creamer, sugar bowl 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 main market woman is probably teken from a postcard. Collaged onto her skirt is a further market women taken from a street scene of Harbour Street in Kingston, Jamaica.This was made by James Hakewill (1778–1843), an English architect known for illustrated publications. This image appears in his book: 'A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from Drawings Made in the Years 1820 and 1821' (London, 1825; reprinted, Kingston, Jamaica and San Francisco, 1990), plate 4. The botanical imagery includes the peacock flower, (Caesalpinia pulcherrima), also now known as the ‘Pride of Barbados’. Since the late 17th century, European natural scientists dicovered from Indiginous and enslaved women that the seeds of the peacock flower had abortive properties.

The the 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 saucer.