JACQUELINE BISHOP: The Narratives of Migration

ABOUT “THE NARRATIVES OF MIGRATION”

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The series of plates derives its title from a poem I wrote which traces various migrations within my family. As a child growing up on the island of Jamaica, I never knew my mother’s father, but I knew that he lived in England where he had another family. My mother and her brother– his children– were left back on the island of Jamaica. 

Jamaica’s relationship with England began in 1655 when, having failed to wrest Cuba from Spain, the English settled on Jamaica as a secondary prize. While I grew up in an independent country (achieved from England in 1962) England still loomed large in my consciousness as a child born in the 1970s. Even today, the British Monarch remains Head of State of Jamaica, which is part of the Commonwealth. 

In this work, it is both my family’s history and a larger English/Jamaican history that I have sought to trace. These plates consist of family photographs of my grandmother, my mother, and my mother’s brother in Jamaica, and my grandfather, his wife, and my aunts in England. They reference the recent Windrush scandal whereby British citizens from the Caribbean living in the UK for decades were being deported back to the Caribbean, and they tell a longer story of enslavement. Replete are images of the flora and fauna of the Caribbean which would be taken from the island to fill English gardens and give rise to the field of Natural history. Also included are the icons of nationalism developed for Jamaica by the British. 

What these plates show is that in both personal and political terms, the relationship between Jamaica and the UK is one that is enduring.  

-Jacqueline Bishop

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