Fresh Milk is excited to welcome Rayanne Bushell and Nadijah Robinson to the platform as our next artists in residence from October 5 – 30, 2015.

Rayanne, who we first connected with in Glasgow while participating in the International Artist Initiated project in 2014, will be volunteering at Fresh Milk and working with our growing archive of images, while Nadijah, a Canadian artist of Barbadian heritage, will be reconnecting with her extended family to explore her roots and the notion of ‘home’ in Barbados through her artistic practice, including using mixed media collage and fabric work.

About Rayanne:

Rayanne Bushell is a Black British visual artist currently based in Glasgow. Bushell’s work uses photography, text and various printing techniques to reconstruct her family history, using this as a prism through which to investigate post-colonial identities, christianity and community. Research into the history of Black arts in Britain and the lack of representation of Black artists underpins Bushell’s practice; in November 2014 she founded Motherlands a zine for POC artists and writers and in August 2015 she started a pop-up POC Zine Library.

Motherlands was recently included in Visions of the Future: Women, Publishing & Autonomy, Islamic Human Rights Centre, London 2015. In 2015 Bushell collaborated with artist Isaac Kariuki on Shft+Ctrl+Save exploring how marginalised people utilise the internet and social medias as means of creating safe spaces and communities,Shft+Ctrl+Save was shown at Meta Gallery, Miami in May 2015.

About Nadijah:

Nadijah Robinson is an artist and educator based in Toronto, currently working in the media of Collage, Painting, Performance and Installation. She received her BFA from the University of Ottawa and a BEd from OISE University of Toronto. Working with skills developed from practices such as sewing, silkscreen printing, batik making, filmmaking, collage, painting, and graphic design, her work combines what is needed to construct a particular affecting image, object or experience. A refusal of the premise of a white canvas, or a blank slate, the use of found fabrics, images and other materials acknowledges that no thing comes from nothing. The history, cultural references, and sensory implications of the materials, and sources of the stories she tells all lend their particular significance to the larger artwork.

Nadijah Robinson’s work aims to reflect and archive the stories of communities in which she is strongly rooted, and which are not often represented in conventional art spaces. Through the practice of conducting interviews with community members, Nadijah is able to identify important themes, to highlight significant stories, and to learn directly from community members what they would like to see in artwork that presents itself as being for and about them.

Recent projects include a The Mourning Dress for Trans Black Women featured in Pride in Toronto 2015, a mural completed a mural as part of the Church Street Mural Project in preparation for World Pride 2014, and the curation of a photographic archive of Black musicians and entertainers from the 1930s-70s for the Archie Alleyne Scholarship Fund. She has shown work with the Art Gallery of York University, Gladstone Hotel, Daniels Spectrum, with Nia Centre for the Arts, and as part of the Mayworks Festival for Working People and the Arts.