Jade Montserrat is using a mixture of literary references for the works in the exhibition "In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens". WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn is referenced in the work "Possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers".
"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. The recurring motif of the groin, presented as a frontal, semicartographic outline from waist to thigh, may celebrate female sexuality as a source of strength, and yet combined with such utopianism are more discomfiting references to sexual objectification and bodily dispossession." Ton Denman, Art Review, September 10, 2021
