Talk Artist Talk Jade Montserrat

Join us for the closing event of the Jade Montserrat solo show where the artist will discuss the series of works on paper exhibited in the Stuart Hall Library in the context of her wider practice.

Combining quotations with her own writing, Montserrat refers to her watercolours and drawings as dissemination tools. Sometimes the words and fragments point towards a specific reference, other times they are brief traces of a conversation or experience. What they all have in common is they are instances in Montserrat’s ongoing exploration of building spaces of belonging and care. They sit alongside other strands of her manifold practice, informed by the interplay of art and activism and the literary traditions of the Black Atlantic.

The series of watercolours and drawings are in dialogue with the context of the Stuart Hall Library, which in turn amplifies the multitude of voices in a perpetual, generative reverberation. With thanks to Contemporary Art Society and York Art Gallery (York Museums Trust).

Biography

Jade Montserrat is a research-led artist and writer who studied the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Drawing (2003) and at Norwich University of the Arts (2010).

Montserrat works at the intersection of art and activism through drawing, painting, performance, film, installation, sculpture, print and text. The artist interrogates these mediums with the aim to expose gaps in our visual and linguistic habits.

She is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at The Institute for Black Atlantic Research, University of Central Lancashire, (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. Recent projects include: The Last Place They Thought Of, ICA Philadelphia (2018), there’s something in the conversation that is more interesting than the finality of (a title), The Showroom (2018), Instituting Care, Humber Street Gallery (2019), Love.Love? performance at Wysing Arts Centre (2019) and an Art on the Underground commission to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover.

Image: Jade Montserrat, I’d always be sure, 2015. Watercolour, gouache, pencil, pencil crayon on paper.