Montserrat depicts her body entangled with various rural landscapes. In several pieces, she employs visual slippage between her body and the landscapes in which she grew up in Yorkshire. These representations of her body’s interconnectedness with English landscapes declare her inherent belonging. Montserrat also includes palm fronds, banana trees, and pineapples on and around her body, knitting together the geographies of Northern Britain with those of the Caribbean and West Africa and using tropical aesthetics to claim an expansive geography of belonging.
"Navigating the affective ambiguities of bodily consciousness, often through the prism of Afro-diasporic subjectivity, Jade Montserrat’s drawings resist clear-cut interpretation. In them, fragments of the body merge uncomfortably with dreamy landscapes, strewn with motifs that feel symbolic but whose meanings could be multiple and conflicting: a pair of feet with vultures perched on its toes and heels, while scattered over its pinkish skin are blue-and-yellow round bushy growths, possibly sea anemones, and diamantine shards (Feet, Spectator, 2016)." Ton Denman, Art Review, September 10, 2021
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