Journalist Carol Williams shared a review of our recent public event FRESH MILK XX on page 18 of the Thursday, May 11th 2017 edition of the Nation Newspaper. She focused on the artwork of Barbadian artist Kraig Yearwood, whose work was on display in the studio. FRESH MILK XX also featured a presentation by international curator Pamela Lee and a reading by US-based poet drea brown.
Click here to read the full article!
Barbadian artist Versia Harris has been accepted into an MFA program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, USA, and is having a fundraising sale of limited edition artwork to contribute to some of her costs.
Versia is an incredible artist, and she has volunteered and been an enormous help to Fresh Milk for a number of years – please take a look at a statement by Versia below, and click here or on the following image to see her available work and how you can support her!
Incipience No. 1 (edition of 5), Digital Print, 30″ x 32″
Hi Guys! Welcome to my latest fundraising effort. I’ve been accepted into an MFA program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, USA; I will start in September this year. Most of the funds for me to go have been accounted for, however, there are some extra costs that I still have to acquire. I am selling these limited edition prints to help. If you are able, please purchase one.. or two.. or all! No, seriously any support you can offer would be so appreciated. Even if you can’t, I hope you still enjoy these on-screen images – I must say, though, that the physical is much better 😉
You can email me at versia.abeda@gmail.com for further details about payment methods and shipping options. All questions are welcome.
Thank you!
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About Versia Harris:
Barbadian artist Versia Harris received her BFA in Studio Art in 2012 and was awarded with The Lesley’s Legacy Foundation Award, an annual prize given to the top graduate. She has participated in seven local and international residencies in Barbados, Vermont, Curacao, Trinidad and Brazil. In 2014, Versia’s work was featured in the IV Moscow International Biennial for Young Art themed ‘A Time for Dreams’ and was subsequently selected to be apart of the follow up exhibition MOMENTUM_InsideOut screening of ‘A Time For Dreams’ in Berlin. Her animation ‘They Say You Can Dream a Thing More Than Once’ was awarded ‘Best New Media Film’ at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, 2014 and in 2015 won Best Animation Short in the Barbados Film and Video Association awards. Her first solo show in Barbados was titled “This Quagmire”. She is currently a tutor at Barbados Community College. Versia tackles perceptions of fantasy in contrast to the reality of her invented characters
The Fresh Milk Art Platform is pleased to invite you to FRESH MILK XX, taking place on Tuesday, May 9th, 2017 from 7-9 pm at Fresh Milk, Walkers Dairy, St. George.
This event will feature a showcase of recent work by Barbadian artist Kraig Yearwood, the 2017 Fresh Milk ‘My Time’ Resident Artist, who was on the platform during the month of March.
Responding to Kraig’s work will be Pamela Lee, an international curator and gallery manager who has worked at the Dominik Mersch Gallery in Sydney, Australia, who will also make a presentation about the connections and potential for collaborations between the areas of art and science.
Finally drea brown, a US-based poet and Fresh Milk’s current resident artist in partnership with the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, will speak about her residency, the context behind her work, and close the evening with a poetry reading.
This event is free and open to the public.
Directions to Fresh Milk can be found on the ‘About Page’ of our website here.
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About Kraig:
Kraig Yearwood is a Barbadian artist and designer. Yearwood studied graphic design at Barbados Community College. He has worked as a freelance graphic designer, and has also worked as lead designer for his self-owned clothing label where he has showcased at some of the region’s biggest fashion weeks. He mainly uses mixed media in his visual art practice and to date he has exhibited in numerous local and international group shows, as well as having 5 solo exhibitions.
Yearwood says his approach to his work is partially intuitive while often informed by minimalist sensibilities, and lists eclectic influences such as introspection, relationships, nature and local and global current affairs for much of his production. Many compositions certainly feature a sense of structure and order that we often associate with graphic design, yet these elements are often broken and interrupted by marks that suggest another layer of idiosyncratic reasoning.
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About Pamela:
Pamela Lee is a skilled arts industry and communications manager with over 5 years of experience working in high profile arts organisations, the not-for-profit sector and corporate companies in Europe and Australia. She has a Master’s of Curating Contemporary Design from Kingston University London in partnership with the Design Museum, London, where she also worked as a curatorial and digital media development assistant. Most recently, Pamela has worked as the gallery manager for the Dominik Mersch Gallery, one of Sydney’s leading international, commercial galleries.
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About drea:
Originally from St.Louis, drea brown recently completed her PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals most recently Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander and Southern Indiana Review. drea is also the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook competition judged by Douglas Kearney. Her chapbook dear girl: a reckoning was released in 2015.
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drea’s residency is supported by the
John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies
The quarterly Barbadian and Caribbean arts newsletter RA (Representing Artists) was produced in the early nineties, spearheaded by a group of Barbados-based artists who saw the need to create a forum for more critical writing around contemporary arts in the region.
As part of her Tilting Axis Fellowship that has seen her travel to arts spaces throughout the Caribbean, Jamaican writer and curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson has digitized all six editions of this newsletter to make them available for public access on the Fresh Milk website. This inaugural curatorial fellowship is supported by the British Council.
With so many ongoing conversations about the development and future of Caribbean art today, it is important to know the history of spaces and what has laid the foundations for these discussions. Over the last 24 years, how have things changed? What has remained the same? We hope that these texts can be a source of inspiration, evaluation and critique, both for the state of the creative environment then and for encouraging productive discourse moving forward.
Edited by: Annalee Davis
Designed by: Arthur Atkinson (Issues 1-4) and Kristine Dear (Issues 5 & 6)
Contributors: Annalee Davis, Allison Thompson, Ras Akyem, Ras Ishi, Christopher Cozier, Nick Whittle, Alison Greaves, Roger Lipsey, Ken Corsbie, Dominique Brebion, Stan Kuiperi, Marianne de Tolentino, Dennis Tourbin, Petrona Morrison, Gayle Hermick, Geoffrey MacLean, Elizabeth Barnum and Sharen Carmichael
Click here to access the full issues on our Projects Page.
In December 2016, UK-based artist Dr. Ayesha Hameed undertook a 2-week residency at Fresh Milk, where she conducted research for her ongoing project Black Atlantis. Ayesha shares an excerpt from a longer piece about her residency experience, and her exploration of the ‘plantationocene’ – a term which looks at the relationship between agriculture and our current geological era. Read more below:
Black Atlantis// The Plantationocene[1]
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Speed
This is my first evening at Walkers, once a sugar plantation and now a dairy. It is dusk.
I step outside of the flat, climb the slightly mossy stairs and turn right into the purpling light. To my left are horse stables, behind me is the house and in front of me are fields of grass.
The sound of the frogs begins at dusk and it gets louder. The paved drive I am walking on ends at the field, and I turn right onto a dirt path. The grass is long on either side of the path. When I reach a lone tree to my left, the path dips down a small hill and continues to a line of trees in the distance. To the right is the South and there are some twinkling lights in the distance. A small bat swoops over my head.
Underneath the alien and screechy whir of the frogs there is a silence. A black dog runs up to me from the big house and then turns around and goes back, looking back at me as if trying to get me to follow it. I walk away from it and into the long grass and listen.
The frogs get louder. The sky turns black.
What is the relationship between climate change and plantation economies? This is an exploration of many things – the beginnings of a fourth chapter of an ongoing performance called Black Atlantis, visiting the heartland of one of the three stops of the triangular trade, and taking seriously Donna Haraway’s and Anna Tsing’s use of the term ‘plantationocene’ which connects the development of a plantation form of production to the beginning of the current geological era that we are in.
The ‘plantationocene’ is a placeholder for the relationship between agriculture and the new geological era we find ourselves in called the anthropocene. But the kind of agriculture they are thinking about is the violent replacement of diverse farming tactics, of forests and of pastures by the factory-like extractive structure of plantations – the cultivation of single crops like sugar and cotton for export, produced by enslaved and indentured laboring bodies forcibly transported across vast distances. Plantations eradicate the diversity of what is cultivated, devastating the land, violently exploiting and expropriating the bodies working on the land and destroying any possible autonomy for self sustenance for those living in these areas.
[we use the term] Plantationocene for the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor… Moving material semiotic generativity around the world for capital accumulation and profit—the rapid displacement and reformulation of germ plasm, genomes, cuttings, and all other names and forms of part organisms and of deracinated plants, animals, and people—is one defining operation of the Plantationocene, Capitalocene, and Anthropocene taken together (Haraway 162).
The plantationocene suggests that the geological force of humans on the planet’s ecosystem had its roots in plantation slavery, its instrumentalisation of the soil for a singular kind of production and its violent enslavement of bodies to be used as machines to cultivate and harvest the cane, and to ideally reproduce and sustain itself. As Anna Tsing says, the plantationocene is formed of “machines of replication” or “simplified ecologies, such as plantations, in which life worlds are remade as future assets” – in other words it highlights the aftermath of a radical and violent incursion and its effects on lifeworlds that intertwine the human and the natural.
It is a nearly impossible endeavour to read an over three hundred year old history of plantations and their continually evolving social relations in the wake the oldest instance of plantation slavery, and in the continued presence of descendants of slaves and plantation owners and overseers, against the slow temporal swings that mark climate change. Reading a still living and present history against a slowly unravelling future of increasing frequencies of natural disaster, the warming of the ocean, the jeopardisation of sea life is incommensurable and probably pointless as they operate on such different registers, and the possibility of finding common ground at ground level is nearly nil.
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Another beginning: It is half past two and I’ve been waiting in the parking lot outside Harrison’s Cave for about thirty minutes. Tour buses and hired taxis efficiently pull in and out of the parking spaces, loading and unloading their American passengers.
Two men are chatting beside me, one of them offers the other one a lift and they walk over to a brightly painted bus. I figure I have 20 minutes more to wait.
I hear a loud noise and look up from my book to see a diesel powered mini bus hurtling through the lot like a getaway car for a heist. It abruptly stops at a hasty angle near the bus stop where I am sitting. The sign on the bus just says ‘city’. People climb out quickly with the diesel engine rumbling.
As I climb the stairs the bus speeds up again so fast I trip onto a seat. I pull myself up holding out my 2 Barbadian dollars to the driver with an apologetic ‘excuse me?’ and the man in the passenger seat waves impatiently at me to sit down.
I look out the window as the bus hurtles down dirt roads hewn through fields of cane speckled with sun and dust. We screech to another stop and the engine grumbles and roars.
Outside are the fields of cane and men and women waiting on the side of the road.
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[1] This is an excerpt from a longer chapter forthcoming in MAP Office’s Catalogue “My Ocean Guide published by Lightbox” (2017). Research for this work was made possible by a Travel Grant awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts to attend residencies at Alice Yard (Trinidad) and Fresh Milk (Barbados).
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This residency was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts
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