I arrive in Middlesbrough on a warm February day, the pale winter light creating a muted colour palette in the townscape, intermittent sunshine suggesting spring is just around the corner. I’m with an old friend and collaborator, poet and local historian p.a. morbid, and as we cross the grass, we bump into MIMA director Elinor Morgan and walk together towards the gallery. Passing by the café two children hold up self-made artworks to the windows; we pass through the community garden, café and into the bright atrium where we are greeted by a hubbub of families making art. There’s a sense of dynamism animating the space, with craft tables, books and installations blurring the boundaries between family activities, shop and exhibition. We enter the gallery to find more young people, sketchbooks in hand, exploring the exhibition. I think they must be from a college trip, but then realise it’s Saturday and infer that this is more of the education programme at play.
There is a lively atmosphere and in the centre of the space stands Jacqueline Poncelet, clad in subtle shades of coral corduroy; she looks up, her face brightening, and greets morbid affectionately. The two have been talking over the preceding months; morbid has been sharing of his knowledge of the town’s history, and had also been present at the exhibition preview a few days before, discussing fragments of Middlesbrough Pottery alongside other artists from the area (this a part of MIMA’s Art+Social scheme, which supports creative communities from the Tees Valley).
MIMA is an institution which for many years has centred community and the history of its locality within its curatorial programming. Poncelet is also an artist with a long track record of working in the public realm and whose work is responsive to place, exploring (amongst other things) a fascination with the built environment and materiality. She is known for her large-scale interventions on public buildings, notably her work ‘Wrapper’ (2012) on Edgeware Road created for Art on the Underground – a vast façade of bright interlocking patterns drawn from her research into the local area.
Meeting Jacqueline and observing her chatting to people in the gallery, it’s clear that she has also become embedded in Middlesbrough and it’s creative communities; indeed, there is a substantial public commission in development, and alongside the exhibition Poncelet has also curated a collection of ceramic works from the Middlesbrough collection in a space on the second floor. Her own work had been part of this collection since the 1980s, though prior to working with MIMA she had not visited the town.
Today’s conversation between the artist and curator Elinor Morgan is one of a series of events celebrating the exhibition. One of the things that marks out MIMA’s programming is the care that they take to make events like this accessible, and today we are joined by an audience from the area alongside friends of Jacqueline, many of whom have travelled hundreds of miles.
This is the most substantial exhibition of the artist’s work to date, funded by an award from the Freelands Foundation which specifically sets out to support female artists whose work has been underrepresented curatorially. Something which is gratefully acknowledged by both artist and curator, ‘a once in a lifetime opportunity – a chance to get to know myself’ as Jacqueline puts it.
The exhibition is extensive, spanning fifty years of practice. That alone is a humbling thing to take in – even more so to write about. Both artist and curator are keen though to point out that this is not a retrospective – as Poncelet says, the word retrospective would feel like a full stop, as if the work had been put in a box, finished off. This is a thought echoed by Morgan, who says it’s important to recognise that Poncelet is very much a practicing artist; this is not about looking back, her work is very much in the present. The warmth and appreciation between the pair is palpable, as with the audience, many of whom have known her work for decades.
The desire to keep things open also seems especially fitting when thinking about this work, a practice that slips between disciplinary boundaries, plays with materials and context as comfortably in the built environment as in a gallery space. Even here her work has escaped the gallery, infiltrating the building in the form of digital wallpapers made for the lifts. Works on show date from the 1970s up to 2024 but are not organised chronologically. Instead, the curation takes a thematic and aesthetic approach, creating dialogues between pieces across decades, easily filling MIMA’s four substantial interconnecting galleries.
The exhibition opens in a light voluminous space. Large scale vinyl works created from watercolour paintings stretch up towards the ceiling, counterpointed by delicate porcelain pieces from the 1970s, which lean into the wall in elegant architectural vitrines. On the facing wall a series of framed watercolour paintings, a fraction of many such images produced over decades, create a dynamic graphic display.
It is this work that I encounter first; I have seen some of these images online ahead of visiting, but nothing had prepared me for the delicacy and precision of colour in them. I find myself feeling quite moved – perhaps it’s the handmade-ness of these precise patterns, or the delicate injection of colour on a winter day, but there is something here which feels like it’s travelled from a different time. The artist’s hand is ever-present yet understated. Fine pencil lines mark out grid patterns, laced together with fluid sensuous lines of vivid watercolour – the realisation of just how much time and care has gone into making this work gives it a quiet insistent power. It’s a delicacy which compliments and contrasts with the early ceramic work, which on first impression seems entirely bleached white, but on closer inspection also holds splashes of glaze in turquoise and mauve. As with the paintings, these works seem simultaneously loose and precise. Ceramic forms echo domestic objects – I’m reminded of art deco tea pots or jelly moulds, but nothing is spelled out. It feels like an illusion in my own mind, the almost translucent porcelain feeling far too brittle for everyday use.
There is something playfully elusive and contradictory in this work. It’s an experience which repeats as I move round the exhibition; works which at first seem unrelated begin to speak to one another across space and time. A wallpaper made for MIMA, ‘The Devil in the Detail’, 2023-24, creates a dizzying repeat pattern across the end wall of one gallery. Initially resembling 70s decor, close inspection shows a photographic image of a shop-front mid renovation (I’m told taken on Albert Road in Middlesbrough). Multiplied at scale it takes on a geometric rippling effect – creating optical illusions and prompting me to go back round the corner and look at glazed tiles from the 80s which hold similar ridged motifs, layers of translucent glaze shifting in space.
It’s tempting to compare some of this work to Op-Art but that would seem reductive. As I move around the exhibition, time and again I encounter works which defy easy classification, new perspectives opening up the more time you spend with them. This sense of play and open-endedness seems a defining feature of the show.
Discussing the relationships formed between works, Poncelet describes the process as a ‘happy accident’, rather than something meticulously planned. I can see why she talks about it like this, embracing the openness of her artistic process. But also, I think she’s being modest; as someone meeting this work for the first time, it speaks to a remarkable consistency of vision and skill spanning decades and across so many different media and projects. Her practice encompasses a diverse range of materials and techniques all handled with considerable skill but also a lightness of touch. Ceramics, photography, paint, sculpture and weaving sit together with apparent ease, but nothing is easy to pin down.
Poncelet says she feels the need to subvert things. Even with a process as structured as weaving, she plans the warp but not the weft. This seems a good analogy for her wider practice, and one of the joys of this show. The ceramic work, which she became known for in the 1970s, was abandoned completely for 30 years as she created works fusing painting, photography and sculpture, including carpet pieces, collaged together from domestic remnants and found here in dialogue with a substantial painting ‘Who Knows?’ 1994, or I should say series of paintings hung together in an asymmetric grid. The delicate watercolour of the first gallery has given way here to impasto acrylic side by side with panels of furnishing fabrics and photography. This approach to collage (or is it bricolage?) is echoed in the photographic works at the far end of the space. Created using repeated images of parkland and city streets, and made with domestic photo-printing from Snappy Snaps, they look like modernist tiles, blending seamlessly with the digital wallpaper on the nearby wall despite the twenty-year gap between works. The effect is kaleidoscopic, fun, engaging.
Smaller sculptural works are scattered throughout the space, many referencing the female body. A tiny form animated by a tangle of wire perches on the edge of a plinth, and in the centre of the space a larger abstract bronze sculpture ‘Bronze with Hair’, 1988, lies prone, long strands of hair bursting forth along one side, as suggestive of some rare sea-creature as anything human. I’m particularly drawn to a small abstract sculpture resting on a Formica wood effect table ‘Shy Objects’, 2016/18, a rough twist of thick material which initially looks like clay but reveals itself to be cast iron, it’s ends polished to a mirror-like shine reflecting the printed wood pattern of the tabletop, appearing almost hollow from some angles. It’s the illusionism of this work, the sense that nothing is quite as it seems, which begins to unlock the exhibition for me. Later Jacqueline tells me that this piece is really heavy, and I’m struck by her sense of play and poetry, the rendering of something so weighty yet visually light.
As with the painted work there is a slippage between abstraction and figuration, maybe a kind of surrealism but always with an anchor in the everyday world. Often this can be found in the materials themselves, the use of carpet and furnishing fabrics subverting the seriousness and masculinity of abstract painting. This seems most obvious in the floor work, shifting the picture plane and using materials so readily associated with the domestic, the decorative, the mass produced..
The final gallery has a more muted colour palette, sculptural works from the 1980s forming a harmonious dialogue with recent large-scale watercolours inspired by walks in the Welsh landscape. Again there are bodily qualities and hints of the domestic. Writhing, surreal forms patterned with subtle textured glazes reminiscent of damask; a female form striped with delicate earth and pastel tones feels momentarily like a vase, or item of clothing.
In the centre of the space colourful weavings hang on frames, a bright injection of colour in this otherwise calm space. I read the title ‘Appearances can be deceptive’, 2020-23. It seems a fitting final encounter – the circular route leading back into the light and colour of the first space.
Reflecting afterwards, the exhibition’s title In the Making seems ever more fitting, not only in the visibility of the artist’s hand but also in the way Poncelet’s work invites interpretation. As a viewer I felt welcomed in that making, or rather, making sense of the work became a shared experience.
At the end of the public conversation, Morgan says that she feels Jacqueline’s show is like a homecoming and I tend to agree; it’s clear that this is a fertile collaboration. Poncelet’s focus on craft, materiality and the built environment coupled with an openness to work beyond the gallery space feels like a perfect fit, especially given Middlesbrough’s long relationship with the Arts and Crafts Movement which also situated art within the everyday. Spending time with fifty years of Poncelet’s work felt like a rare privilege. It’s clear from hearing her talk that this is not a full stop but a point within a practice which is constantly unfolding. I’m excited to see what happens next.
Michele Allen is an artist and researcher based in the North East of England.Jacqueline Poncelet: In the Making, at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, runs from 1 Feb – 23 June 2024.
This review has been supported by MIMA.
Published 15.04.2024 by Lesley Guy in Reviews
2,197 words
