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 from a personal connection through my British-Jamaican daughter and has since deepened my understanding of Britain’s colonial history and the enduring cultural ties between Jamaica and the city where I live. From this position of both connection and inquiry, I approached the work.
Developed through collaboration with local sign painters and street artists, the project seeks to move beyond colonial representations of the Caribbean by engaging with the visual and material afterlives of empire. Through walking the streets and exchanges with artists in neighbourhoods such as Denham Town, Kingston, the work uses the camera as a means of learning - tracing forms of resistance, creativity, and everyday resilience embedded in Jamaica’s street culture.
Hand-painted Jamaica laid a critical foundation for my continuing practice, deepening my understanding of how Caribbean visual culture has shaped Britain - and how the histories of both places remain profoundly intertwined.
Selected images from the series are shown below. Additional images can be viewed from the menu under the connected sub-series Lots of Signs: Jamaican Dancehall Signs and Jamaican Sign Painters.
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: selected images of hand-painted signs used for commercial use and those daubed from across the island. 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 - selected images of street art and some commercial signs that fall more disctitively into a more into street art style from across the island mainly by Jamacian artist, with one exception of a graffiti 'piece' painted near Fleet Street, in Kingston for Paint Jamaica by foreign artist - representation of an African women with use of stylised lettering. Leading Jamaican artists inculde work by Matthew McCarthey interviewed for the project 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.