Jacqueline Poncelet shudders as she recalls her shocking treatment from parts of the art world earlier in her career. It was while she was making art from carpet remnants and there were people who hated it with a passion.
“It was very upsetting because people responded so viscerally,” she says. “They had such strong opinions. You can’t imagine how emotional they were. I’ve always had some supporters within the art world but at the same time have had some people who were so against me, which was very upsetting. You’re having to take on this extraordinary negativity and a kind of anger. It has taken me literally years to find a way of talking about them that liberated me from their … well, I can’t even find the words to describe what they were doing.”
Poncelet was making her own carpets by collaging remnants bought from carpet shops. She has come to see them as a “representation of Britain”, raising questions about class and colonialism. “The British have been aesthetic thieves as well as every other kind of thief you can think of,” she says. “These carpets represent a place in society, but also things we’ve taken from other cultures. They are like an extraordinary social document.”
Did ordinary gallery-goers, not the “art establishment”, like Poncelet’s carpets? “They did,” she replies. “They saw them as a chance to reminisce and talk about their own experiences in life – and children loved them. But the art world were: ‘Don’t show me that, I’ll vomit.’”
Poncelet is talking as she prepares for her biggest, most ambitious exhibition where there will, praise the Lord, be a carpet, loaned from the British Council collection.
Hopefully people won’t want to be sick over it. “I think life has moved on,” she says. “At least I hope it has.”
Poncelet, 77, is an artist many people believe should be widely known, but the truth is that she isn’t. It might have been different if she had been a man. Or stuck to one thing, instead of being an artist impossible to pigeonhole.
Instead, she has been working largely under the radar for 50 years; a star to some and an inspiration to many. Her work is in collections including Tate, the Stedeljk Museum in Amsterdam and MoMA in New York but she has never really had her “moment” until, it is hoped, now.
Mima in Middlesbrough has opened a show surveying Poncelet’s diverse career from her early days as a ceramicist and taking in her forays into sculpture, textiles, wallpapers, paintings and public art. It is a big deal for her but also a huge moment for the gallery, which is staging the show after Poncelet won the £100,000 Freelands award in 2021.
The prize was created in 2016 to enable a UK arts organisation to present an exhibition by a female artist who “may not yet have received the acclaim or public recognition that her work deserves”. Poncelet is unquestionably in that category, says Mima’s artistic director Elinor Morgan who has been working with the artist on the exhibition for the last two and a half years.
It is, Morgan says, “phenomenal to have such a kind of stateswoman of contemporary art” as Poncelet at Mima and the generous prize money allows the gallery to do things it would normally not be able to afford.
The exhibition itself will include some of Poncelet’s earliest ceramics – bone china pots which weigh almost nothing – as well as newly commissioned works made after the artist’s hours and hours wandering the streets of Middlesbrough. They include new wallpapers in the lifts and on a huge swathe of a gallery wall.
Poncelet thinks the British have an odd attitude to wallpaper, but she loves it. “My background isn’t entirely English and we always went abroad in the summer and I fell in love with those mad French hotels where everything is wallpapered, including the ceiling. There would be a dresser and even the dresser would have it. So I always think of wallpaper as like a space for your imagination. I love the idea that you create a different kind of imagined space.”
Poncelet was born in Belgium and moved to England as a young child, studying at Wolverhampton College of Art before going on to the Royal College of Art, which was liberating because of the freedom she was allowed. “It was glorious,” she says. “Everything is accountable now, isn’t it? Everything has a form which has to be filled in.
“In those days there was a generosity which allowed you to develop without constraints. It meant that when you left college you were actually quite self-sufficient. You hadn’t had a million tutorials, you hadn’t had to justify everything you did. You learned to justify it to yourself.”
As she was starting on her career the Crafts Council was also starting, helping to create an audience for the work of artists such as Poncelet. One memorably strange early exhibition experience was being asked by the furniture store Heal’s to show work on its shopfloor.
“They put me in the ceramics area with the plates and the cups and saucers,” said Poncelet. “People were totally mystified. They thought, what on earth are these objects and why are they so expensive?”
After she abandoned ceramics she turned to sculpture but never achieved the success of her mostly male peers in the 1980s new British sculpture movement, including her then husband Richard Deacon.
The reasons why Poncelet has never got the recognition she deserves are varied and by her own cheerful admission, she makes it difficult for people to get a handle on her. She has moved from thing to thing and it’s sometimes difficult to join the dots. As well as ceramics, sculpture and wallpaper, her career has included watercolour painting, oil painting, weaving, complicated photomontages – “I loved Snappy Snaps” – and, partly to earn a crust, teaching and public art commissions.
A book on Poncelet is being published as part of the Mima show and there is talk of a permanent public artwork at Middlesbrough railway station. Neither Poncelet nor Mima can talk about that yet, they say, so what it might involve is anyone’s guess. In the past she has created a terrazzo dado for an Edinburgh international festival building and decorative vinyl for windows at Oxford’s John Radcliffe heart centre. Her most eye-popping public art work – and one which Morgan says turned her into a total “fangirl” – was Poncelet’s wrapping of an entire building next to Edgware tube station in London in 2012.
Morgan says Poncelet’s diversity of output was one reason she was not the famous name she deserved to be. “The infrastructures of the art world, academic and commercial and curatorial, have formed around artists who maybe have a signature medium or way of working,” she says. That and the “myth of the male, solo genius artist”.
Poncelet these days divides her time between London and south Wales where her partner, former gallerist Anthony Stokes, lives. She agrees that her career would have been different if she had been a man. But she is not bitter.
“There is always that but it doesn’t particularly bother me. I just think it’s a fact of life and I’ve had such an interesting life that I can’t sit here weeping about it. Maybe it would have been less interesting. Maybe somebody would have tidied me up. Maybe somebody would have tried to manage me. Maybe this is my moment. Because I’m older.”
• Jacqueline Poncelet: In the Making is at Mima until 23 June
