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 2018 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.
The project has resulted in an extensive body of work spanning 2017 to the present, documenting Jamaican graffiti, signs, and street art. Selected images are shown below; further work features in the subseries Lots of Signs, Jamaican Dancehall Signs, and most of the artist's work in Jamaica carries the threads of this project.
Ghost Sign (2018) The faded hand-painted advertisement for Furniture Co. Ltd clings to a colonial-era building in downtown Kingston - a visual trace of coloniality embedded in the city’s architecture and street view.
Sign (2018) Grocery & Snack Counter. Commercial sign painted by one of the island’s prominent sign painters, Nurse, who runs a sign shop in Negril. His work can be seen throughout Westmoreland and on high-profile commissions across Jamaica.
Above Gallery Slider: various images of hand-painted signs used for commercial purposes and those daubed from across the island. The featured image was for Anthony Able's Record Shop in Negril, Westmoreland, 2018, painted by the owner.
Photograph: Dunn's Every Little Shop sign, Port Antonio, Westmoreland, 2019.
Wall mural by artist Taj Francis, Fleet Street, Kingston, Jamaica
Wall mural by artist Matthew McCarthy, Rockfort, Kingston
Graffiti painted as part of Paint Jamaica, 41 Fleet Street, Kingston, Jamaica
Wall mural by artist Taj Francis, Fleet Street, Kingston, Jamaica
Above Gallery slider: Various selected images of street art and some commercial signs that distinctly fall into the art style from across the island, mainly by Jamaican artists. There is one exception: a graffiti 'piece' painted near Fleet Street in Kingston for Paint Jamaica by a foreign artist, depicting an African woman in stylised lettering. The selection includes works by leading Jamaican artists, Matthew McCarthy and Taj Francis.
Jamaican graffiti is found across the island - on walls, shopfronts, and street corners - serving as a spontaneous public record of social and political expression. Often, daubed messages respond to everyday struggles, faith, and resistance, giving voice to those excluded from formal power structures. Rooted in Jamaica’s urban visual culture, this graffiti operates as a form of communication, protest, and community-making - a textual Jamaica where spoken language takes visual form in the street. Some scholars describe this as a form of 'throw-word': a Jamaican way of expressing critique and commentary, closely linked to the performative traditions of dancehall.
Photograph: Kemroy dauded graffiti and post-Hurricane Melissa scene on the site of the market, which was destroyed in Black River, St Elizabeth, 2026.