Artist Statement

On one hand, the market woman/huckster is the most ubiquitous figure to emerge from plantation Jamaica.1 Yet, as pervasive as the figure of the market woman is in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, she remains critically overlooked. In this set of fifteen dishes, I am both paying homage to the market woman—centering her importance to Caribbean society from the period of slavery onwards—and placing her within a critical context. In particular, I place the market woman within a long tradition of female labor depicted in diverse imagery that I have sourced online, including early Jamaican postcards, paintings of enslaved women from Brazil, the colonial paintings of the Italian Agostino Brunias, and present-day photographs, which I collage alongside floral and abolitionist imagery.

I work in ceramics because all the women around me as I grew up—my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother—cherished ceramic dinner plates. These were centerpieces kept in one of their most important acquisitions, a specially made mahogany cabinet. To fabricate the plates, it is important that I am working with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent in the former Spode factories. In the realization of the series, that connection imbues them with a meaning that shows the long and enduring relationship between England and Jamaica. For that same reason, British Art Studies is a fitting venue for their first ever publication and partner to create an accompanying film exploring the plates and their themes.

Though the likenesses of none of the women in my family are represented in this series, centering the market woman is my way of paying homage to my great-grandmother Celeste Walker, who I grew up knowing very well, and who was a market woman/huckster/milkwoman par excellence. Celeste was born in the tiny district of Nonsuch hidden high in the Blue Mountains in Portland Parish on the island of Jamaica. Her mother died on the way home from a market, when my great-grandmother was too young to even remember her face. In her adulthood, while my great-grandfather farmed the land, my great-grandmother was the huckster who could easily carry bunches of bananas and baskets of food on her head; the market woman who travelled to far away Kingston to sell in Coronation Market, the largest market on the island. She also hawked fresh fish, and prepared and sold coconut oil, ginger beer, cut flowers, and cocoa beans that were pounded in a heavy wooden mortar. I remember her in my childhood as the milkwoman waking very early in the morning and walking through the district selling fresh cow’s milk. The tradition of huckstering would be passed on to my grandmother who relished the role in her older years. My hope in doing this work is to give much respect to the market women of the Jamaican and larger Atlantic world who have fed, and continue to feed, nations. The market woman is the defining symbol of Jamaican and Caribbean societies.

Many thanks to Rhiannon Ewing-James, who put me in touch with ceramicist Emma Price, with whom I worked so successfully in the realization of these plates. Sarah Wilson of the Courtauld Institute has been so very kind and supportive. Many thanks as well to Baillie Card and Sarah Victoria Turner of British Art Studies, who immediately grasped the importance of the market woman’s story and who have both worked assiduously with me in getting her story told. My doctoral supervisors at the University of Leeds, Will Rea and Claudia Sternberg, have helped tremendously in centering the market woman in my thinking. I am also very thankful to New York University Liberal Studies and the New York University London Program: Dean Julie Mostov, Director Catherine Robson, and Associate Director Ruth Tucker for the opportunity of teaching for two years in London. That time in London was immeasurable in allowing me to make ideological connections across the Atlantic World and specifically about ceramics. Finally, this project is dedicated to my father, Michael Johnson, who encouraged me to make the plates in memoriam to my great-grandmother Celeste Walker and my grandmother Emma Chin-See.