Jacqueline PONCELET (b. 1947) moved to England as a child and now lives and works between London and South Wales. A pioneering multidisciplinary artist, she has worked under the radar for much of her career, producing work across textiles, ceramics, watercolour, painting, and clothing design—resisting easy categorisation.

In the early 1970s, Poncelet gained recognition for her delicate bone china ceramics, which felt almost weightless in the hand. A formative trip to New York later that decade, where she encountered the city’s vibrant textures and artificial colours, led her to adopt industrial techniques—using incised lines and coloured slips to replicate urban patterns.

On returning to the UK in the 1980s, Poncelet was loosely associated with the New British Sculpture movement, though her use of craft media and anthropomorphic forms stood in stark contrast to the conceptual and minimal approaches of her male contemporaries, including Tony Cragg and Anish Kapoor. Despite being collected by major institutions and staging solo shows at Whitechapel (1985) and Kettle’s Yard (1988), she never received equivalent recognition. Her work was also featured in the 1986 Venice Biennale. As the YBA movement dominated the 1990s, Poncelet’s practice shifted towards public art and teaching. In 2009, she was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create Wrapper, a permanent work for Edgware Road Station completed in 2012. In 2013, she collaborated with Tate Enterprises and Welsh mill Melin Tregwynt on a series of woven textiles.

In 2021, she was awarded the Freelands Prize, culminating in a major retrospective at MiMA, Middlesbrough, which opened in January 2024.