Tracey Thorne

Hand-Painted Jamaica explores Jamaica's visual culture through a photographic survey of hand-painted signs, street art, and graffiti. The project began in 2017 as a photographic survey to document street-level visual culture and developed through collaboration with local sign painters and street artists. It seeks to move beyond colonial representations of the Caribbean by engaging with the visual and material afterlives of empire.

 

The work is rooted in an embodied practice of walking and collaboration — moving through neighbourhoods such as Denham Town, Kingston, alongside local artists. Using the camera as a means of learning: tracing forms of resistance, creativity, and everyday communication embedded in Jamaica's street culture.

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The project has resulted in an extensive body of work spanning 2018 to the present, documenting Jamaican graffiti, signs, and street art. Selected images are shown below. Further work features in the sub-series Lots of Signs, Jamaican Dancehall Signs, and most of the artist's work in Jamaica carries the threads of this project.