Hand #1, Kingston, Jamaica

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

Commissioned by Midlands Art Centre in conjunction with the 70th anniversary year of the Windrush, Andrew Jackson’s series of photographs, From a Small Island, responds to the intimacy of his parents’ story of contemporary migration. It examines the impact of changing geography and different psychological spaces in relation to the personal experience of the Jamaican diaspora.
In 2017, the artist visited Jamaica for the first time on a research trip to meet relatives and family friends. It allowed him a firsthand insight into his parents’ experiences, to understand his own heritage more fully, and to revisit the stories and reminiscences he had heard as a child growing up in Dudley. Unsurprisingly, what he saw didn’t quite match up to what his parents had described. Within these photographs, Jackson touches on themes of nostalgia, home, belonging, and perhaps more poignantly, un-belonging.

Andrew Jackson is an artist who engages with the challenges of representation and narration through the mediums of photography, film and writing. His interventions focus on migration, memory and notions of urbanism; they speak to how the experiences of others impact both upon our systems of belief and our notions of self, but also to our connections to the physical spaces around us and those who inhabit them. Jackson is a recipient of the Autograph ABP 2018/ Light Work International Photography Residency in Syracuse, New York. A graduate of the MA Documentary program with distinction at Newport in Wales, he co-founded and co-directed ‘Some Cities’, a community-oriented participatory photography company from 2013-2018. In 2018, he was nominated for the Elliott Erwitt Fellowship. Jackson lives and works in between Birmingham, UK and Montreal, Canada.

Places

Jamaica, Kingston (Jamaica)

Subjects

car, tree, hand, dress, mother, contemporary migration, Jamaican diaspora, wing mirror, steering wheel

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), photograph (as object name), C-digital photograph

Artist

Andrew Jackson

Title

Hand #1, Kingston, Jamaica

Series Title

From a Small Island

Edition

One of an edition of 5

Date

2017

Medium

Photograph, digital C-print on paper

Dimensions

height: 64.5 cm, width: 79.8 cm, depth: 3.9 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, July 2019

Provenance

Purchased from the artist by UK Government Art Collection, 26 July 2019

GAC number

18819