Nadijah Robinson shares her final blog post about her residency with Fresh Milk, concluding with her thoughts on how history is written, told and understood, and the value held in the land and our own bodies  in remembering/passing on these stories. She also shares the impact of her presentation to the final year students in the BFA programme at Barbados Community College (BCC) in considering her goals as a socially engaged artist. Read more below:

My last week at Fresh Milk. I have been wrapping up my work in the studio, making connections, having conversations, getting souvenirs, seeing my Bajan family and seeing some last sights.

On my last morning in the studio, I finished the piece I’ve been working on, although it doesn’t have a title yet. I know now that it is about how the history that I want to recognize is not written in books, it is written in the earth, in the land and in our bodies and blood. It is most accessible in oral stories, by observing ourselves and the culture we create, and by intuitively knowing what we do.

I did my presentation to a 3rd year art class at BCC this week. I gave a talk and slideshow presentation on my history of community-engaged work. This is a collection of my work that sometimes approaches and is within the realm of ‘social practice art’, but is also peppered by work that is more appropriately called arts-based youth work. In preparing this presentation I realized how much my practice has been formed from a desire to do something with my artwork.

I remembered a moment of crisis in high school when I felt like I had to make the choice that would change the rest of my life and set me on a particular path – the middle and high school years in Canada felt full of these deciding moments. I felt I had to choose between being a professional artist and a teacher, more specifically whether to take grade 11 Art, or something more ‘academic’. These were two career paths I’d known for a long time that I’d wanted to pursue. At the time, becoming a teacher was a promising career in Toronto – there was a teacher shortage that would soon after become an incredible teacher surplus. The pay was decent, and it was basically the definition of job security. I had watched all of the terrible, misguided teacher-saviour films, and they had created in my mind a sensational image of what being a teacher could be –  a way to effect change in the world, locally. I wanted that, to be a vehicle of social change. But mostly I just wanted to make art, though this was not the wise career choice. There’s no money in art, and I didn’t want to be poor and struggling forever. Not only that, but I didn’t want to be preoccupied with the self-involved, decorative, wishy-washy activities that having an art career seemed to be all about. I wanted a way to make artwork that meant more than that one-dimensional caricature-like story I was presented. My younger self wanted to make art that was all about edgy stuff and politics and was ground-breaking and would one day make it into an Adbusters magazine. I wanted to make artwork that would infect people’s minds with possibilities of better things to come, and place a how-to handbook in their hands. I chose in the end to take grade 11 Art, because I had the genius realization that I could be an art teacher, and have an art career in my off time. I’m glad I did.

In doing this presentation more than 10 years later, I realized how I came to reconcile wanting to make art that does stuff for people. I’m still working on it, but I have been listing for myself a set of guiding principles as I go, the first of which was that I must know what I am trying to do with my work, who I’m doing it with (as opposed to for), and in what language (medium and vernacular) I would do it. Along the way I added things like prioritizing integrity, and supporting community-led projects and speaking with my own voice.

I feel very grateful to have had this experience at Fresh Milk, and it is significant that I did my residency here, in Barbados. Being able to reconnect with my family, with Bajan culture and with the history of this place, and having had the conversations that I have had this month has shifted how I see my own particular cultural makeup. The diaspora upon diaspora, the historical memory and living in North America, Toronto in particular. Some ideas have shifted and some have solidified, but they are complex things to reconcile and I feel as if I’ve just begun again.

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This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

In the third week of her Fresh Milk residency, Toronto-based artist Nadijah Robinson writes about her progress so far, shifting her focus from necessarily being on production to absorbing as much as she can from the experience, gathering information from a number of sources and letting things unfold in an organic way. Read more below:

This week was spent doing the most. Looking back on it, I have no reason to feel like I haven’t been doing enough.

This week I made some progress on the piece I am working on, the background is coming together slowly but surely. I know this piece is somehow about the land’s memory, but I am still unsure of the specifics.

I’ve decided to focus my energy on gathering as many resources and impressions as possible before I leave, rather than trying to know what I want to do specifically with them. It doesn’t seem like the most intentional way to go about this, but it seems like the best way to make the most of my remaining time here.

Early in the week, I attended Rayanne’s presentation to 3^rd year art students at BCC. Meeting the students and participating in their discussion around different ways they felt under-represented in the Barbados narrative, society, or their early school years was eye-opening. That this experience is as common amongst these students as it is amongst my own peers in Toronto speaks to the ever present power dynamic that dictates who writes our histories, who frames the narrative, who has set up the norms we resist. These days I am preoccupied with the question of what story I end up living in/living out, and how much control I have over that story. Much of my education work, community and art work are born out of a reaction to a traumatic and white-supremacist teaching of history (at all levels of my schooling) and the daily experience of racism. These frame my understanding of everything. If I wasn’t preoccupied with trying to heal from this, then what else might I be doing? It often feels like a trap, to be consistently resisting a belief system so large and entrenched, to be trying to create small alternative visions and truths here and there. I know, in my more optimistic moments, that it is necessary work, and it is my generation’s work to be doing.

I went to the museum on Thursday, and was disappointed with the narrative that was presented to me. I shouldn’t have been, but the level of gloss applied over a violent history was glaring to me. Emancipation in many historical narratives is continually presented as a time where white people suddenly came to the realization that slavery was morally reprehensible and decided to give black people their freedom (in exchange for compensation, and after a period of “apprenticeship”).

Friday morning made up for my disappointment as I got an amazing tour of plants around Barbados with Anthony Richards. I learned so much of Barbados/Caribbean history through plants and much about of the magic and symbolism of certain plants for different peoples. I made friends with a giant baobab tree of approximately 1000 years, a calabash tree, a black willow tree, and a giant silk-cotton tree. We spoke of mourning and burial beliefs and traditions, which because I live within the spectre of black death in North America, holds particular interest and urgency to me now. We also visited a number of historical sites, like the site of a mass grave that was found at the ports where slave ships used to come in, but which is now a parking lot, with no signs or markings to commemorate those lives or deaths. This tour is something I will most likely mull over for a long time.

Later that day and over the next couple days I visited the national archives, got lost and cranky, went on a driving tour with my cousins and saw the Animal Flower Cave and Little Bay on the north east coast, and went on a challenging (for me) 3 hour hike with my cousin and the Barbados Hiking Association starting at Long Beach.

What I’m reading these days is a mix of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed to relax, Stuart Hall’s text Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’  Between the World and Me. All of these are brilliant.

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This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.