On 22 June 1948, HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing with her 492 Jamaican passengers, the first in a whole new wave of migrants to make the journey from one tiny island nation to another, attracted by new citizenship rights conferred on Britain’s former colonial subjects.  

Seventy years on, those who made that long sea crossing are now woven into the fabric of British cultural life, along with their children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. Yet far from being resolved, the questions around race, identity and nationality that they grappled with continue to be a focus for intense and often heated debate today. 

In From A Small Island, a new exhibition commissioned by MAC Birmingham to coincide with this year’s Windrush anniversary, Birmingham-born photographer Andrew Jackson uses his own family’s experiences as a starting point to explore the subject of migration. Between visits to Jamaica and the US, Jackson found time to tell us more about the show, ahead of its opening in May. 

“We’re at a pivotal time in Britain where in the last few years, migration has been ever-present on the political scene, clouding the Leave vote, among other things,” he says. “I like to see this exhibition as opening a window for discussion. I’d seen lots of work about migration before, but it always seemed to be presented as a problematic, short-term thing. There was hardly anything about what happens to migrants when they stay in a country as they age and get older.”

Despite its weighty and politically charged themes, the project was initially borne out of something at once more personal and more universal. 

“Growing up I’d heard a lot of stories about Jamaica, but when you’re a kid, you kind of mentally switch-off: ‘Oh no, not that story again!’ But as you get older, you suddenly become more aware that your parents aren’t going to be around forever. 

“Whenever I bought new equipment I’d always used my family as amateur models, but it wasn’t until my dad got very ill that I thought about the fact that I hadn’t seriously documented or recorded their stories. 

“I became interested in the ways in which shifting geography impacts upon the psychology of the individual. I think for many migrants like my mum, on some level, it’s almost as though they’ve never landed. They’re always somewhere out at sea.”

Given its visible presence and historical importance for both Britain and Jamaica, it’s no surprise that the sea features prominently in Jackson’s photographs, serving as a potent metaphor for isolation, change and yearning for something out of reach. At the same time, however, many of the images also firmly anchor their human subjects on the land.

“One of the mottos of Jamaica is that it’s the Land of Wood and Water, so there are elements of that within the work. I was also thinking about the reasons why black people were brought there in the first place - they came over the sea as well as leaving by it, and they were brought to work the land, so the human body is placed in direct connection to the landscape in my work.”

That complex link between people and place not only begs the question of what happens to a person when connections are cut, but also of what happens to the place they leave behind.

“I began to wonder what effect that generation leaving might have had on Jamaica - if there was a brain-drain and all the brightest and youngest people left. I think for my parents, it’s a place stuck in time - one that in many ways ceased to exist for them when they left. My mum never went back, she never saw her brother and father again, never attended any funerals. Of course, like all families, we have our own folklore that’s been passed down, so part of me wanted to go and check the veracity of those stories.”

Unsurprisingly, when Jackson visited Jamaica for the first time, in 2017, what he saw there didn’t quite match up to what his parents had described. 

“What’s interesting is that I initially saw going to Jamaica as a way of connecting to my parents, but when I came back and told them about it, I realised that my experiences were starting to override and erase their own. Thinking about how those stories had sustained them over the years, it felt strange coming back and telling them that it wasn’t like that any more, like I was loosening their grip on the space.”

But it’s not just the journey of that generation ‘slipping away’ that Jackson seeks to document. The story of From A Small Island is an intergenerational one, exploring how attitudes and perceptions both change and stay the same. 

“For much of my youth, I guess the myths around Jamaica had sustained me too. Growing up, I think perhaps I didn’t feel entirely British or really wanted here. At school, people would say I was Jamaican or West Indian or Afro-Caribbean - I was never just British. So mentally, you retreat to that place, maybe as a place of safety. 

“But of course, when I actually went out to Jamaica, people started telling me I was English. My nickname there was English - which of course I am. So even as a second-generation migrant, I can feel something of that dislocation my parents felt.”

Moreover, in today’s increasingly globalised and super-connected world, it’s a feeling that more and more people may be able to identify with. 

“Whether you’re going from Jamaica to Britain or just moving down from Scotland to a new job in London, you’re effectively leaving one space where you have one defined identity and moving to another space to create a new one. Ultimately, I guess it’s about exploring the nature of belonging, and why it matters to us.”

From A Small Island runs from Saturday 5 May until Sunday 8 July as part of MAC Birmingham’s Beyond Windrush season. Admission is free from 11am to 5pm Tuesday to Sunday and Bank Holidays.

By Heather Kincaid