Teacup from 'The Keeper of All The Secrets'

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

This 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 market woman in the collage of this object is taken from a postcard showing a banana seller from the Antilles, c.1910. The botanical imagery includes a passion flower taken from Asa B. Strong's,'The American Flora...' (1855) and its calming medicinal properties were used in treating the pain of abortions. The other flower is taken from 'Flora Danica', a Danish atlas of botany produced 1776-1883, of the Masterwort plant. Bishop states this plant was "used to stanch the flow of blood during abortions... the masterwort is a plant indigenous to Europe that was in time transplanted to the Caribbean... the symbolism of the masterwort is why I also chose it, as the plant means strength, bravery, innocence and fragility — all of which the market woman represents for me."

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 'JB: 2023: 3/3' on the bottom of the teacup.