Jade de Montserrat

Pass on, 2023, HD video, credit: Jade de Montserrat

Dr. Jade de Montserrat was the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship supporting her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, and the development of her work from her Black diasporic perspective in the North of England. de Montserrat works through performance, drawing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, print and text. Concerned with challenging structures of care in institutions and with the intersection of gender, race, class, and colonialism, often in the context of life in rural communities, she makes artworks that explore the vulnerability of bodies, the importance of recording and preserving history, and the tactile and sensory qualities of language de Montserrat is a Tutor at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She proudly serves on the Board of Trustees at Crescent Arts in Scarborough, OUTPOST in Norwich, and Alchemy Film & Arts in Hawick. de Montserrat is represented by Bosse & Baum Gallery, London. 

Overarching praxis statement:

I am a visual artist and writer based in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. I make artworks that explore race and the vulnerabilities of bodies, the tactile and sensory qualities of language and challenge the structures of care in institutions. 

Excavating shared histories alongside delving into my personal narrative, I work at the intersection of art and activism through painting, performance, film, sculpture, installation, print and text; interrogating these mediums with the aim to expose gaps in our visual and linguistic habits. My drawing installations, performances, and works on paper are linked because of the reciprocity between body-as-material and material embodiment of the invitation for dialogue. Through text and image, the work demonstrates a commitment, driven out of a necessity, to understand my body’s positioning within histories and legacies of, and cultural and theoretical responses to, chattel slavery and migrations in the context of Black Atlantic cultural studies. 

Current art and/or research interest:

Informed by my own mixed-race heritage, my art aims to challenge society’s embedded racism and inequalities related to gender, age, ability, religion and other characteristics. My work considers community and communality as a material axis for belonging and imagining, within and beyond the frame of artmaking and art discourse. I often use drawing as a means to reflect on personal and historical events, as well as define and occupy space. I refine and aim to be especially attuned to what happens when situations intersect to cause more complex forms of discrimination, and weave academic research into my visual art to reframe questions around the representation of Black women in terms of care, protection and preservation.

The work I make interacts with specific societal modes such as Black Lives Matter, historical campaigns such as the abolition of slavery and Josephine Baker’s praxis (and the politics they invoke). As an entertainer, French Resistance agent and civil rights activist Josephine Baker is a mode for thinking through family, activism, celebrity, media, movement and race. In the 1950s Baker began creating a ‘Rainbow Tribe’, adopting twelve ethnically diverse children in an attempt to create an ideal mixed-race family as an emblem of a post-racial world. My ongoing ‘Rainbow Tribe’ project is inspired by Baker’s, and tackles the idealism and naivety of such attempts to sweep racism off the table without grappling with its profound insidiousness to create an ideal mixed-race family as an emblem of a post-racial world. 

More information: 
https://www.bosseandbaum.com/artists/jade-montserrat/

Axis Web talk: 'Putting care at the centre when carelessness reigns,' with Jade de Montserrat: https://youtu.be/5JZ1pT2SKU8?feature=shared