Emma Critchley’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

February 8, 2016February 8, 20162 Comments

British, London-based artist Emma Critchley shares a post about her first week in residence at Fresh Milk. A mixture of familiar and unfamiliar experiences have coloured the start of her residency, as she has returned to an old love of diving and the ocean, but doing so in Barbados, which is new territory for her. She has been exploring shores and wrecks, collecting film and photographic material above and below the sea’s surface which she will continue to develop over the coming weeks. Read more below:

This week has been a week of acquainting and reacquainting
Acquainting myself with this beautiful island
Recceing on land and in the sea
Finding places that inspire me, where I will return to make work and finding people who will get me there:
Divers

Reacquainting myself with the sea; a place where I feel at home, happy
Although I’ve not dived Bajan waters before there is something about being in the ocean that’s like an old familiar friend, a place I already know, have always known

Twice to Carlisle Bay – a walk off the beach into the blue where wrecks await us. Cement, wood, steel. Un-wanted vessels, chambers of histories that have been laid to rest; Barge (16 years), Corn Wallis (16 years), The Bajan Queen (14 years), Ellion (20 years), Ce -Trek (40 years), Berwyn (87 years)

Another shore dive off the coast of Speightstown to trim the weighting for my new underwater film equipment. A test that turned into a dive … for 70 minutes … in search of a wreck that we never found …

Sunday’s ‘two wreck challenge’ with “Badass’n”, the Barbados Dive Association. An opportunity to recce two more wrecks

Off the side of the boat 18 divers descended over a small wreck like predators picking over a carcass. Photographing, catching, probing …

Together we headed out into the blue in search of the Pamir – a sunken 170ft freighter that was to be our destination. After 30 minutes swimming headlong into the current its majestic figure finally emerged out of the darkness. But we had reached the end of air. Our time was up and we had to return to the surface. A wreck to be explored again

Animal Flower Cave, a beautiful coastal cave with sea pool over looking the rugged north coast. A natural limestone chamber carved out by the Atlantic elements … another place to return to

Helen Cammock’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

February 8, 2016February 8, 20162 Comments

British interdisciplinary artist of Caribbean heritage, Helen Cammock, shares her first blog post about her Fresh Milk residency. Starting by exploring the island and being introduced to the physical and cultural climate in Barbados, Helen has been using her time so far to take in the details of a new place, appreciate the openness of the experience, and embrace the beginnings of ideas as she starts to collect material to work with as things unfold. Read more below:

There’s been an Animal Flower Cave, the crashing waves and precariously poised rocks at Bathsheba, coral, sugar cane fields, potholes, sunshine, rain, buffeting wind, cows, geckos, an affectionate cat, dogs accompanying (well shepherding) us, swimming with a turtle, the impending birth of a foal…

There’s been meeting representatives from the office of the Cultural Industries Development Act and the National Cultural Foundation, and understanding a little more about the cultural landscape in Barbados….And there’s been Annalee, her family and colleagues at Fresh Milk giving us the most wonderful welcome.

I have spent this week trying to concentrate on detail – what I see and hear around me – making space for thoughts, questions, ideas and stories to emerge.

This is the beauty and the basis of this residency – it is an opening, an aperture, an opportunity to develop these new ideas and thoughts – somewhere new, different, alien – somehow reassuringly unknown – and to find space to be in my own head.

On the second day I began filming – extracts, fragments – and by the fourth day I began to write – just the beginnings of something – but that’s the point. It really feels like the beginning of something – and this is why I’m here – for these very beginnings of something.

Next week I’ll visit the museum and its library – I’m not sure what I’m looking for or what I’ll find but I’m starting with the production of sugar on the island. I’ll shoot a closed sugar factory and the tempestuous coast at North Point. I’ll deliver a photography workshop in a local primary school and give an artist talk at Barbados Community College. It’s busy yet at the end of this first week, the feeling that the beginnings of something are with me…and that I have been offered the space to do something yet unknown with these beginnings, is palpable as I await the imminent birth of a foal here on Prendoma Stud.

Fresh Milk welcomes Helen Cammock and Emma Critchley to the Platform

January 28, 2016February 26, 2016Leave a comment

Fresh Milk is excited to welcome our first resident artists for 2016, Helen Cammock and Emma Critchley, who will be travelling from London to be in residence with us between February 1 – 26.

Helen Cammock, Still image from The Singing Will Never Done, 2011.

Helen Cammock, Still image from Changing Room, 2014.

Helen, who is of British and Caribbean descent, works with video, photography, installation and text to consider how individual and collective experiences expose structural inequality through exploring the politics of society and visual, spoken and written language and of representation. Her planned project under the working title Myth, Lie and Omission will explore the ‘inopportunity’ of acknowledgement, hidden achievements and perceptions of worth, aspiration and value, particularly as they relate to race and gender, science and invention.

Emma Critchley, Still image from Aria, 2013.

Emma Critchley, Still image from Resonance, 2014.

Emma’s practice is rooted in the underwater environment. She is particularly interested in the way sound is perceived beneath the water’s surface, and how this affects our relationship to our surroundings. She will use the residency to explore these concepts and the idea of echolocation as a way of using sound to explore the rich natural environments that Barbados has to offer. By working with a variety of underwater locations, very different to everyday experiences, and placing them within more familiar spaces, she hopes to question notions about the role of the acoustic landscape and our perception and relationship to the spaces around us.

Helen and Emma are taking this opportunity to continue dialogues that they have already begun about filmmaking. Both their concerns and work are very different, but they see a real value in some of the conversations that have emerged, and view this residency as a prime chance for a peer development discourse that is already proving productive for both of them to further evolve.

_________________

About Helen Cammock:

Helen Cammock graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2011. Her work spans photography, video, poetry, printmaking and installation.

Helen says about her work: Using installation, video, photography and text, my practice considers how individual and collective experience exposes structural inequality through exploring the politics of society, of visual, spoken and written language and of representation. I often use archival material and historical points/events that are connected to my subject position. I am invested in the relationship between the individual lived experience and the connection to the wider post colonial context. In constructing narratives that in general pivot around historical or contemporary events the viewer might recognise particular dates, events and speeches, but they are woven into a narrated if fragmented story. I am interested in the idea of authorship – and something I call ‘the audible fingerprint’. I will always be drawn to the question – Who represents whom, and for whom?

Recent screenings and exhibitions include: Hmn4, London, 2016, Carte de Visite, Hollybush Gardens, London, Dec’15-Jan‘16 Transform, Tate Artists Moving Image Screening Programme, Tate Britain, 2015, Changing Room, in Common Place, Brighton Photo Fringe, 2014, Scene, Pitzhanger Manor Gallery, London, 2014 You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, Hollybush Gardens, 2014, Reach out and Touch Me, Hollybush Gardens, London,2013, London Art Now, curated by Armesden, Lodge Park National Trust, 2013 Oriel Davis Open, selectors Ben Borthwick & Ann Jones.

Her writing has appeared on photoworks.org.uk and Aperture Magazine and she was shortlisted for the Bridport poetry prize in 2015. Helen was Co-Director of Brighton Photo Fringe 2008-12 has has run projects for The Photographers Gallery, London, Open School East, London, Photoworks, London and PhotoVoice, London.

__________________

About Emma Critchley:

Emma Critchley has worked as an underwater image-maker for over ten years. In 2011 she graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art. Through working with a combination of photography, video and installation she explores the human relationship with the underwater environment. Emma has developed works funded by The National Media Museum, The Photographers Gallery, The Arts Council England, The British Council, the Singapore International Foundation and INTERREG IVC (financed by the European Regional Development Fund). Awards include the Royal College of Art Sustain ‘Moving Minds’ award, winner of the British Underwater Image Festival, finalists in the Saatchi Gallery & Channel 4’s New Sensations, the Saatchi Gallery & Google’s Motion Photography Prize and most recently the Firtish Foundation & Saatchi Gallery’s UK/RAINE award. Her work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Australian Centre of Photography, the ICA Singapore, Gerhard Marcks Haus Germany, The National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers Gallery and the Royal Academy.

Season’s Greetings from FRESH MILK: 2015 in Review

December 21, 2015December 21, 20151 Comment

FRESH MILK exists because of the tremendous support we receive from artists, our volunteers and the wider community. This has been a great year, and we are pleased to share our newsletter highlighting activities we undertook in 2015.

We wish everyone a wonderful season and all the best for the upcoming year. We look forward to continuing to engage with you then! Fresh Milk wants to kick off 2016 by learning more about what young artists and filmmakers in Barbados are doing. Graduates of the Barbados Community College (BCC), Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (EBCCI) and all creatives: share your practice with us by sending in a CV, 200 word bio, 500 word artist statement and 5-10 images and accompanying image list or links to your video files. Send all information in one email to freshmilkbarbados@gmail.com by January 29, 2016.

In the meantime, we invite you to take a look at our 2015 in review newsletter!

Maj Hasager & Ask Kæreby – Week 4 Blog Post

December 10, 2015December 10, 2015Leave a comment

Danish artists Maj Hasager and Ask Kæreby who undertook a residency at Fresh Milk during the month of November share their fourth blog post about a very busy final week in Barbados. The end of their trip included everything from research, sound recordings, a catamaran cruise, an exhibition opening, a workshop and our last public event for 2015, FRESH MILK XVIII. Read more about their packed last days below:

Cannon supporting wall.

It seems now like a distant memory of being warm and sweaty night and day. We have returned to Copenhagen after a detour via London and Cologne, and suddenly the days are even shorter and the evenings and nights seem darker and colder. Winter in Copenhagen is a challenge. It always feels strange to have to reflect back on recent events when shifting location, and it sounds like a voiceover in my mind when trying to reconstruct the pieces and images that go with it.

Waiting for the library to open early Monday morning

At the museum

Our fourth and final week begins in the library of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, which seems to have chosen cryonics as their method for preserving their material. Maj meets with historian Miguel Pena while Ask reads on the formation of workers’ unions and migration to the Canal Zone – until the chatter of his teeth becomes so disturbing that we leave to defrost in the tropical sun. Even this didn’t prepare us fully for the Danish winter though…

We also pay a visit to Government Information Service, located in an unassuming building in the outskirts of town, and seeming to operate with a landline and the phone book as the primary resources. They are the sole distributor of the documentary Diggers, which is the only locally accessible source of footage from the construction of the Panama Canal. As it’s right after lunch, and our contact person is not around, we meet and greet seemingly all employees in the office, as a prolonged discussion over the spelling of the title takes place until we finally leave with DVD and receipt in hand.

Friendly neighbours

Tree in the backyard

Tuesday afternoon we are picked up by a driver, who is struggling to find our location hidden away in the centre of the Island – we are in fact “out of range” according to his company’s definition, and it does feel that way sometimes, which seems curious in such a small place.

Great working conditions

Hydrophone dragged after catamaran

We take the hydrophone sailing off the west coast, capturing some wonderful eerie sounds when anchored or wind powered – though any engine active in the entire bay can be heard clearly. As the sun sets, the visual beauty of the surroundings rivals the sonic seascape.

Versia Harris’ exhibition ‘This Quagmire’ at Punch Creative Arena

Ronald Williams and Katherine Kennedy at the opening of ‘This Quagmire’. Photo by Annalee Davis

On Wednesday morning Maj meets Annalee to have a studio visit on her work. Exciting conversations unfold before we head off to meet Allison Thompson, the director of the fine arts department at Barbados Community College (BCC), where exchanges on pedagogy, teaching methods and structures are shared. In the evening we are attending the opening of This Quagmire, an exhibition by Versia Harris at the Punch Creative Arena in the Morningside Gallery at BCC.

Therese and Maj in conversation. All photos of FRESH MILK XVIII by Dondré Trotman

Ask presenting research and soundings

Beyond Publishing’s presentation

Getting ready for the event

FRESH MILK XVIII

Wednesday is also the final session of the sound workshop, and everyone chips in with fascinating yet very different compositions. We are also busy preparing for FRESH MILK XXVIII, which is quite a packed evening with both of us presenting work, Maj in conversation with Therese Hadchity, and the Beyond Publishing collective presenting their activities as well.

A packed final week, that somehow sums up the intensity of a month’s residency at Fresh Milk. Our suitcases are loaded with reading material and textile works by Mark King when we leave Walkers in St. George. A huge thank you to the wonderful Fresh Milk team: Annalee Davis, Katherine Kennedy, Natalie McGuire and of course also Barbara and Vere Davis. One thing is for sure: We can’t wait to return.

_____________________________