“…guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength, in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own”. Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1972)

Jade Montserrat’s first solo exhibition at Bosse & Baum, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, takes its title from Alice Walker’s text. The exhibition will include new works on paper by the artist. Walker’s text helps readers to locate Black women’s bodies as those shaped and ravished by a legacy of an inhumanity and centres the garden as a tenet of creativity towards healing.

Convinced that there is a connection, or line, between ourselves and the earth, and that line, like our communications with one and another, is drawing, Montserrat works through these ideas as a way to harness acts of radical creativity.

Using a close up of her torso, Montserrat incorporates African heritage hairstyles into adorned torsos depicted on paper. Bringing together ideas of enslaved women braiding native seeds into their hair before being forced to bound transatlantic slave ships, hoping against the odds for autonomy on the other side, Montserrat has created decorated torsos that attempt honouring these ‘Mothers’.

About Jade Montserrat

Jade Montserrat’s research-led practice excavates shared histories alongside delving into her personal narrative. Montserrat works at the intersection of art and activism through painting, performance, film, sculpture, installation, print and text; she interrogates these mediums with the aim to expose gaps in our visual and linguistic habits.

Jade Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was also awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Jade’s Rainbow Tribe project – a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of Black Culture from the perspective of the Black Diaspora is central to the ways she is producing a body of work, including No Need For Clothing and its iterations, as well as her performance work Revue. Jade was commissioned to present Revue as a 24 hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance, October 2018, a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (Nov – 10 Mar 2019) which toured to Humber Street Gallery (July-sept 2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover. Iniva and Manchester Art Gallery have commissioned Jade as the first artist for the Future Collect project (2020). Jade is currently in a group exhibition titled An Infinity of Traces at Lisson Gallery in London.

The Art Newspaper: Meet Jade Montserrat, the Black artist who took on the British art establishment 

ArtReview: Review of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens written by Tom Denman