Exhibition Constellations: Care and Resistance Jade Montserrat

Constellations: Care and Resistance – New Watercolours on Display

We are delighted to announce the display of twelve new works on paper by Jade Montserrat created for her Future Collect commission with iniva and Manchester Art Gallery.  These vibrant and evocative watercolours, potent with text and redolent with experiences of the past eighteen months, enter Montserrat’s exhibition and research space Constellations: Care and Resistance at Manchester Art Gallery. They will then be acquired by the Gallery and sit within the collection redisplays.

Montserrat’s Future Collect commission encompasses performance, works on paper and a publication, through which she explores questions of care in relation both to objects and to people and engages with the context of Manchester Art Gallery, it’s collection and collecting practices.  Curator-in-training Nikita Gill has worked closely with the artist to present her work in conversation with works from the Gallery’s collection.  In addition to Some questions about us (2019) by Mark Titchner and Have you ever (1986) by Claudette Johnson, these will now include work by Berni Searle.

Jade Montserrat’s new works will be on display in Constellations: Care and Resistance from 18 September 2021. Manchester Art Gallery is open Wednesday – Sunday, 10am -5pm.

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. Jade 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. 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, (2018), a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover.

Image: Jade Montserrat, Pulse (2017). Watercolour on paper.

Images: Exhibition view: Constellations: Care & Resistance, 2020 – 2022 (Jade Montserrat, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Claudette Johnson, Amaka Nwafor, Berni Searle, Mark Titchner) Courtesy Manchester Art Gallery. Photo: Michael Pollard