Five ceramics and seven works on paper
Jacqueline Poncelet, 1982-2023
Despite her influence, Jacqueline Poncelet’s work produced over the past 30 years has been underrepresented in the UK’s public collections. In 2025, with the Freelands Art FundAcquisition grant – a partnership between Freelands Foundation and Art Fund offering grants of up to £60,000 for museums to acquire, and increase public access to, work by previous winners of the Freelands Award – MIMA righted this, acquiring 12 of her works, eight of which date to between 2009 and 2023.
Carefully selected to illuminate Poncelet’s mastery of pattern and expertise as a maker, this substantial acquisition spans 40 years and represents the spectrum of her lyrical practice. It includes a sculptural vessel, slab-built with inlaid clays( 1983), and three slip-cast porcelain tiles patterned with textures and coloured glazes (1982-88), six abstract watercolours (2009-2011), one larger abstracted landscape painting (2023) and a sculpture made from clay and a found roof tile (House, 2017).
Poncelet is an incredible artist: mercurial and adept. Over the past 50 years, she has restlessly experimented with a range of making processes and techniques to express her interest in material culture and society’s changing tastes. In 2024 MIMA presented the first museum survey of Poncelet’s work and co-published, with Hurtwood, the first monograph on her work. The exhibition ‘In the Making’ was supported by the Freelands Award, an annual prize recognising the work of a mid-career woman artist who has not yet received the acclaim she deserves.
Having trained in ceramics between 1965 and 1972, Poncelet achieved early success with her poised shell-like bone-china pieces. In the later 1970s and through the 1980s, she built more angular and architectural ceramics using a mix of clays and techniques. Untitled (1983) marks a moment of transition in which Poncelet moved from making expanded vessels, plates and vases (which are all already represented in the Middlesbrough Collection) into more playful and angular zoomorphic sculptural pieces. From here, she made a series of remarkable abstracted figurative sculptures in clay, one of which – Handbag (1985) – has also recently been acquired for the Middlesbrough Collection, with support from the Contemporary Art Society Griffin Award.
By the end of the 1980s, Poncelet had moved away from clay to develop sculptures in wood, metal, fur, hair and fabric. House is one of a handful of recent works through which Poncelet returned to clay after a hiatus of nearly 30 years. Both House and Ogwr (02) (2023), a large abstracted landscape, have a strong relationship to the environmental conditions found in South Wales, where Poncelet is based part-time. The larger watercolours, which were shown alongside a series of richly coloured woven textiles sparked joyful reactions from many of MIMA’s visitors.
In the mid-1980s, Poncelet spent time in residence in Denmark’s world-renowned Bing & Grøndahl ceramics factory. The three tiles we have acquired evidence her growing obsession with pattern and the development of a painterly sensibility, both of which are echoed in the series of watercolours she began 20 years later. As this series now numbers into the hundreds, Poncelet and MIMA felt it was important that they were collected as a group. This ensures that future viewers can follow the logic of Poncelet’s patternmaking through her repetition and variation of marks and colours, and that future curators can also enjoy forming their own compositions with the works.
The Middlesbrough Collection is undoubtedly the perfect home for this artist’s practice. Poncelet’s work will join pieces by her tutors, friends, peers and those who have been influenced by her. It will be observed, discussed and studied through MIMA’s engaging and experimental learning programmes and fine art and curating courses. Initially formed from three existing collections, the Middlesbrough Collection has strengths in ceramics, jewellery, drawing and painting. Since MIMA’s 3.3m-tall wooden doors swung open in 2007, revealing a suite of beautiful galleries, its curators have taken this combination of disciplines as a prompt to programme exhibitions that playfully criss-cross between art and craft, blurring margins of once tightly bound disciplines and supporting artists to show the full complexity of their work.
An acquisition of this scale has been urgently required for some years now. Like most collections, the Middlesbrough Collection previously held a small number of Poncelet’s early ceramic works. The number of public collections that own the sculptures and paintings she’s made since 1990 can be counted on one hand. Collections preserve a moment in time for future generations, and through this partial record, Poncelet was at risk of being understood through only a minuscule sample of a life of rich artistic experimentation. This acquisition ensures that Poncelet’s prowess will be understood by future publics and researchers. There is still, however, a lot more work that should be seen and collected.
More information
Title of artwork, date
Five ceramics and seven works on paper, 1982-2023
Date supported
2025
Medium and material
Ceramic, watercolour and pencil on paper
Dimensions
Various dimensions
Grant
60,000
Total cost
61,600
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