new work 41 From A Small Island Andrew Jackson’s From a Small Island is a timely exploration of the complexities of diasporic identity in Britain. Made 70 years after the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury, the photographs connect Jackson’s family history to this now well-known national story. The images include intimate portraits of Jackson’s parents Amy and Alford taken at his family home in Dudley as well as photographs of Jamaica that challenge viewers’ perceptions about the ‘small island’. Jackson’s portraits of his parents allude to the permanent state of unsettled identity that is part of everyday life in the diaspora. In Amy at the window #1 his mother seems to be pensively reflecting on something, or perhaps looking out of the window and imagining her former home. We are transported to this home in the photograph Pouyatt Street, outside where Amy once lived where we witness a young person walking under the shadows of trees and cables about to step out into the light. Those who left Jamaica at the same time as Jackson’s mother were trying to step out from underneath the shadow of high levels of unemployment and the destruction left behind by Hurricane Charlie. They left the island full of hope but also sadness. Amy, who had not thought she’d be leaving her home forever, recalled that ‘when my father hugged me on the dockside, for some reason, I knew I’d never see him again’. The Caribbean diaspora is just one branch of the larger African diaspora, and migration (this time the forced transatlantic migration resulting from the trade in enslaved Africans) is also at the root of Jamaican identity. It is no surprise therefore that Jackson’s photographs of Jamaicans in Jamaica portray a similar unsettled pensiveness to the ones of his parents in the UK. Dancer #2 taken in Kingston, Jamaica has a similar expression to King #1 from Handsworth, England. Both individuals seem as if they are in a place but not really of that place, disconnected from their surroundings and the objects around them. Jackson’s photographs also explore the identity of Jamaica itself. From A Small Island presents an industrial and abandoned Jamaica, far from the tropical paradise many would imagine. In the past, photographers would have edited overhead cables out of photographs of lush vegetation to make the island seem more picturesque and