Guest #CCF Review: Purple Hibiscus

April 29, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Purple Hibiscus (2003) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie follows the story of Kambili, a young girl growing up in a strict household dominated by her father, a wealthy Catholic in post-independent Nigeria. Kambili’s father has created an isolated environment in which she, her brother Jaja, and their mother, Mama, are to live. Controlling by fear and punishment, Papa uses the severe interpretation of the Bible and Catholicism that he received in colonial Nigeria as a way to maintain order in the compound. The novel takes place during a time in Nigeria when the country is falling into civil disorder.

The above excerpt is from our recent resident artist Jordan Clarke’s guest review of Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this week’s addition to the Fresh Milk Books Tumblr – the online space inviting interaction with our collection in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room.

For new Critical. Creative. Fresh reviews, look out for our #CCF responses and see the great material we have available at Fresh Milk!

Halcyon Macleod and Willoh S. Weiland’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

April 28, 2015July 16, 2015Leave a comment

Current artists in the Fresh Milk International Residency Programme, Willoh S. Weiland and Halcyon Macleod, share their first blog post reflecting on the beginning of their time in Barbados. Written this week by Halcyon, we are given some insight into the origins of their collaborative project ‘Crawl Me Blood’, a sound installation inspired by Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea, and how they are using their time at Fresh Milk to collect material and expand the piece. Read more below, and for information on how to get involved with ‘Crawl Me Blood’, click here.

I arrived in Barbados on Sunday afternoon after a whopping forty-seven hours of continuous transit with my three month old baby strapped to my front. Flights were delayed, flights were cancelled, connections were missed. When the luggage conveyor belt at Grantley Adams International Airport emptied and stopped and I was the last one standing there, it felt only right that yes, my suitcases and the baby’s cot were lost in transit. It really is a long way to come, from my home in Hobart Tasmania, the heart-shaped island at the bottom of Australia, to this warm, colourful and utterly compelling island of Barbados. I was met at the airport by my collaborator, Belizean-Australian artist Willoh S. Weiland, who had made a similar journey from Melbourne with her boyfriend and 10 month old babe the week before. Why have we come all this way?

In a 1959 letter, whilst she was working on Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys described her earlier novel, Voyage in the Dark, as expressing how “The West Indies started knocking at my heart.” She added that “the knocking has never stopped.”
– from The Cambridge introduction to Jean Rhys by Elaine Savory

The writings of Jean Rhys and our families’ connections to this region have compelled and propelled Willoh and me across the globe and far from home more than once now. The germ of our current project Crawl Me Blood, took hold in 2011. We landed in Los Angeles and drove across the country to The University of Tulsa where the Jean Rhys Special Collection is housed. There in Oklahoma, is the unlikely home of a collection of Rhys’ correspondence, drafts, unpublished writings, a few personal effects and a touching recording of the author singing songs from her childhood in Dominican Patois. Our journey continued to Placencia, Belize, the village where Willoh was born and grew up, and then on to Black River, in the St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, the origins of my Grandmothers family. Certainly, the Caribbean was knocking at our hearts. We had begun our research for a new Australian interdisciplinary arts project.

But Crawl Me Blood is not about us! Inspired by the Belizean Kriol phrase ‘what crawls your blood’ are the secrets you sense but are not told to you. This phrase is akin to saying ‘it gave me the shivers’. The Crawl Me Blood project reimagines the sinister eden of the tropical garden and draws on the medium of radio to explore the myths we make of paradise and the realities of living in some of the world’s most beautiful places.

Willoh S. Weiland.

Willoh S. Weiland and little Raphaela.

Crawl Me Blood is a radio docu-drama which will be housed inside an immersive installation. Audiences will wander through the installation listening to the audio work via hand held radios which are tuned to pick up a localised FM radio broadcast – the Crawl Me Blood radio station. There are multiple transmitters and the audience wanders in and out of the range of each transmitter, creating an exciting compositional range for the creators of the work. This one month residency at Fresh Milk is a research and writing phase of creative development. We are conducting interviews with Bajan women of all ages, collecting field recordings from local sites and writing the text for the fiction elements of this layered audio work.

The audio work will be enriched by field recordings collected from the Caribbean region and will be intercut with carefully selected Caribbean music and readings from Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark. These various components of the work are being developed alongside each other with a shared focus on the central themes of the work:

how do we imagine and romanticise the landscape of paradise, and how is this imaginary world destroyed by the realities of place?
the experience of women of all colours in the island nations of the Caribbean and in the countries that they migrate to
the responses that the tropical landscape and climate generate in people

It has been an incredibly productive start due to the ground work that Willoh was able to do in the previous week, and thanks to the assistance of the Fresh Milk Team in connecting us with amazing people. It has been our privilege to meet and interview some inspiring Bajan women. We have talked with a visual artist, a theatre practitioner, a poet and activist who have generously shared their perspectives with us. We have also interviewed Jamaican-Australian artist Zahra Newman this week in Melbourne via Skype. On Tuesday, we met with the Fresh Milk Books team and heard all about their reviews drawn from the Fresh Milk collection in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room. One of the team had recently reviewed Wide Sargasso Sea! We look forward to continuing the conversations and learning more about Bajan art and artists through our interviews and the collection.

A big thank you to Annalee and the Fresh Milk Team for making us feel welcome and introducing us to some inspiring Bajan artists this week.

This residency is supported in part by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Alcorso Foundation and Arts Tasmania.

Simone Asia’s Residency: Week 2 Blog Post

April 27, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Simone Asia, current artist in Fresh Milk’s 2015 ‘My Time’ Local Residency programme, shares her second blog post. Continuing her exploration of nature, Simone has managed to begin some of her new ideas – despite a few surprises along the way – and in addition to colour, she is also playing with materials and processes during her residency. Read more below:

Another week of the residency has passed and this one was very hectic. Yes, I started the portrait, but I did not get as much done as I would have liked due to a very busy schedule. Most days I got on site in the afternoons which only allowed me four or five hours to work as opposed to the seven or nine I did most days last week.

Nonetheless this week was interesting. My two phones have been restored and I sourced an old iPod nano to occupy my ears with music and thus quieten my thoughts. Yes, I’m back with the technology, but I will say I paid little attention to them and focused more on the natural elements around me. I did a couple more experimental drawings and reflected on what happened last week to gather inspiration for the portrait. I also explored the land for textures and patterns in nature and observed the happenings on the farm with my two furry pals Rico and Mica. On my breaks they would accompany me while I relaxed and gathered my thoughts.

I had a couple of frights this week – I was attacked by bats when I was leaving Fresh Milk on Wednesday. I think they were trying to intimidate me by flying at my face. On Friday, I nearly sliced opened my face with a retractable box cutter trying to renew the blade. They never mention these hazards in the instructions for awkward people like me.

This week, my attention was shifted to the animals like the bats, a lizard who I named Komodo because of his large size, the local visitors – the troop of green monkeys who would pass through on afternoons looking for food and swinging on trees (I am afraid of monkeys so these visits were usually uncomfortable), the birds – especially the dove who always tries to build a nest inside the Colleen Lewis Reading Room, and the cows.

I got to see the cows being brought out from the milking stations to the fields. It may not sound like much but I thought it was a spectacular sight. I watched as the herd with their heavy udders huddled and strolled down the path. A flock of egrets flew out of nowhere, seeming to accompany them. I watched this majestic sight in awe because I have never seen anything like it. I have not seen Bambee this week. I wonder if she is avoiding me, or has she noticed me yet?

Over the weekend I bought some more art materials. Since I have started the portrait, I am now eager to try out collages; not full blown collages, just minimal ones for now. This week, even though I did not spend as much time as I would like, I still managed to write down a few ideas there.

Wide Sargasso Sea: Can you be insane if you are alone? – #CCF

April 21, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

…Antoinette’s childhood directly informed her troubles later in life, whether it was the rejection by her cold-hearted mother who was only attached to her brother, the constant abandonment by her close friends and family (most of whom used her for personal gain) or the anger of the local people and her status as a pariah. This exclusion only led to further isolation in her mind.

In many ways, Rhys has shaped loneliness within these characters as a ‘getaway’ from reality, so much so that Antoinette would ignore the surrounding world and became intolerant towards people. This alienation, compounded by acts of betrayal, causes Antoinette’s personality to twist. Her issues followed her to her stay at the convent, continuing to chip away at her sanity…

The above excerpt is from Tristan Alleyne’s review of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, this week’s addition to the Fresh Milk Books Tumblr – the online space inviting interaction with our collection in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room.

Fresh Milk is also currently hosting Australian resident artists of Caribbean extraction Willoh S. Weiland and Halcyon Macleod. They will be with us between April 20 – May 23, 2015 working on their collaborative project ‘Crawl Me Blood’, a sound installation inspired by Wide Sargasso Sea. For more information about their project, click here.

For new Critical. Creative. Fresh reviews, look out for our #CCF responses and see the great material we have available at Fresh Milk!

Simone Asia’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

April 21, 2015May 21, 20151 Comment

Simone Asia, current artist in Fresh Milk’s 2015 ‘My Time’ Local Residency programme, shares her first blog post about her time on the platform. Simone speaks about re-acclimatizing to a familiar space, exploring the environment more thoroughly and how unexpected obstacles can push you to act on ideas that have been lying under the surface. Read more below:

My first week here at Fresh Milk was bittersweet. The space itself is a familiar one, but I had not explored it as thoroughly as I have in the last few days.

I was sharing the space with international resident artist, Jordan Clarke, whom I found to be delightful. She was very quiet – in contrast to me – but that helped to balance of the energy within the space. Jordan was on the final week of her residency, and I found that she and her work was an inspiration for me. She did very beautiful self portraiture drawings and paintings. I would offer my feedback on her drawings whenever I could. She also sketched a lot – something I wish I did more. Additionally, there was great material in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room to source inspiration from.

Simone's research in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room

I did not have a solid plan for my work on the farm, but I knew I wanted to do some experimental drawings. I usually do portraiture as well, but I wanted to put my energy toward creating strictly abstract drawings. I surveyed the land, observing patterns, textures, colour and layering. The various types of plants, animals and sounds made me feel more connected to my nature-loving side. I was particularly drawn to the layering on vines upon tree trunks and fallen leaves and twigs piled on the grass, as well as the patterns and vibrant colours that certain plants possessed. From these observations I was compelled to work with colour.

Working with colour is not totally foreign to me, but it is something I am insecure about. I am accustomed to creating monochromatic abstract drawings so I knew that using colour would be out of my comfort zone. Spilling the first two colours of ink and trying to manipulate them made my anxiety and self-doubt kick in. I even tried drawing on top of red paper with black ink, but it still felt weird. I remembered what I had learnt from my last two residencies and open studio at Projects and Space, Alice Yard and Punch Creative Arena, respectively – I need to trust the process, let the concept come afterwards and play.

My first day went well until close to the end of that evening, when all of my devices were submerged in water. It was a tragic start to my week, causing only stress and anxiety. Despite all the drama, the rest of the week went along smoothly – exchanging stories with Jordan and members from the Fresh Milk Books team and visitors – Aieron, Jordan’s husband, and Australian resident artists Willoh, James and baby Equa, who I found to be a very musical child.

I have claimed a cow on the farm as my own; she does not know it yet. Her ear tag is number 503. I call her ‘Bambee’. She got that name because Jordan and I were discussing how beautiful and deer-like she was so I named her to suit.

I got to reflect while being there. I found it ironic how much I loved nature, yet I was very dependent on electronic devices to record my findings. I totally neglected the process of sketching. For months I had been telling myself I would like to sketch more. I got my wish. Sadly, I still used Jordan’s camera and did minimal sketching, but I found myself storing images in my memory. I think for me it takes a while to get into the groove of sketching.

On Friday I spent a couple hours with Jordan and her husband. It was Jordan’s last day in residence at Fresh Milk and Annalee was very busy that day. I found myself alone in the afternoon. The rain poured as if to complement my mood. I will miss Jordan’s presence in the space. While sitting alone looking in the mirror, reflecting on the week as the rain poured in St. George, something came to me. I think I am going to do a portrait even though I wanted to avoid doing one. An idea is brewing.