Image: Wrapper, Jacqueline Poncelet, made especially to clad the new building and perimeter wall next to Edgware Road (Circle line) Tube station. Via Art on the Underground
From 21 September, the New Art Centre will host a new survey exhibition of work by the British artist Jacqueline Poncelet (b. 1947). The exhibition traces the last 35 years of Poncelet’s practice, which have seen her making both intensely private objects and open, large-scale work. Jacqueline Poncelet: Now and Then highlights a crucial moment in Poncelet’s artistic trajectory—in the mid- 1980s, acutely aware of falling into ease of habit with any material or process, Poncelet moved away from ceramics and began to work with wood, bronze, hair, and textiles of various types, creating work that was increasingly composite in nature.
Image: Red Dog,1989, Jacqueline Poncelet. Photo: David Ward.
Moving between media and processes whilst referencing the structures and accoutrements of cultural and social norms, Poncelet’s work describes a lifelong internal discourse. The habit of post-modernism’s ‘anytime, anyplace, any culture’ is second nature to Poncelet, who uses her work to reappraise hierarchies assigned to objects, and by extension, societal attitudes and expectations. Poncelet explores the possibilities of pattern and repetition in sculpture, weave, watercolour, wallpaper, carpet and painting, using these as methods to complicate and conceal, express and obscure meaning, and to change the way we read form or space. Through her use of pattern, meaning is subverted, emotion is sublimated, narrative becomes nuanced: the complicated and the composite take over.
Image: Carpet, 1992, Jacqueline Poncelet.
Watercolours and weaving, as well as ‘small objects’, constitute Poncelet’s most recent work. Her weavings, begun in Wales, are inspired by a love of Welsh narrow loom blankets, and have come to fruition during these recent weeks of isolation - bringing together colour in layers and detail that are, the artist says, “as complicated as the countryside”.
Jacqueline Poncelet: Now and Then is curated by Sarah Griffin, and is the most recent in a series of exhibitions for the New Art Centre initiated in 2010 about material and making.
The New Art Centre is open by appointment from Monday- Saturday, 11am - 4pm. For more information visit sculpture.uk.com