Tracey Thorne
About the researcher
Tracey Thorne is a research artist, photographer, and cyanotype artist whose practice explores colonial histories connected to Jamaica and acts of resistance in Britain. She is a post graduate researcher at Falmouth University's Institute of Photography, where her practice-based PhD is examining the nineteenth-century cyanotype works and legacy of Anna Atkins through a decolonial lens. Her work in Jamaica, which began around 2018, is central to her research and practice.
Research interests
Colonial histories, with special interest in the relationship between Britian and Jamaica. Cyanotype (alternative photographic processes). Visual culture, place-based work, acts of resistance including British protests and visual activism. Decolonial approaches to working with archives.
PhD abstract
Thesis title
Jamaica of the Mind: Decolonizing the Works and Legacy of Anna Atkins
Abstract
A Jamaica of the Mind is a practice-based PhD that uses contemporary photography and cyanotype to re-examine the nineteenth-century botanical photograms of Anna Atkins and her legacy. The research centres on a micro-series of cyanotype plates of Jamaican fern specimens, generally attributed to Atkins and her close collaborator Anne Dixon, made between 1853 and 1854. Today these rare plates are held in Western institutions and private art collections, permanently separated from Jamaica. Atkins’ extensive body of work is typically encountered as aesthetic or scientific objects, whilst the colonial contexts of the foreign ferns and flowers plates are rarely discussed.
The research argues that existing scholarship on Atkins remains shaped by Western epistemologies that have prioritised romanticised and aestheticised readings of her practice, rooted in imperial systems of knowledge. This has produced a sustained silence. Art and photographic histories have consistently detached her cyanotypes from the social and economic conditions of empire that shaped their creation. Insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to archival records that evidence the Atkins family as direct beneficiaries of African transatlantic chattel slavery in Jamaica. My research considers how this absence has constrained scholarly understanding of her practice and the imperial conditions under which the foreign fern plates were made. The micro-series of Jamaican fern plates has remained largely uninterpreted within her wider body of work which dates to 1843, a silence the research treats as itself historically significant.
Through archival research, critical autoethnography, and collaborative cyanotype practice in the UK and Jamaica, the research retraces former Atkins family plantation sites in the Blue Mountain region, re-situating these images within their ecological, cultural, and historical contexts. At these sites, an experimental cyanotype practice will use coffee, cinchona and plantation-connected materials as deliberate disrupting agents, shifting the blue of Atkins's photograms through materials drawn from the post-colonial landscapes from which her specimens were taken.
The research asks: how can contemporary photographic practice be used to decolonise and re-see Atkins's botanical cyanotypes; and how can a decolonial visual methodology re-situate her Jamaican photograms beyond their inherited colonial epistemologies.
Related project
Arts Council funded projects in Jamaica (2018–2024) exploring visual culture, environmental legacies, and post-colonial histories, including Intended for Jamaica — an artist's response to the Boulton and Watt industrial archive held at the Library of Birmingham, examining the sale of steam engines to Jamaican sugar plantations during the nineteenth century.