Willoh S. Weiland and Halcyon Macleod’s Residency – Week 3 Blog Post

May 12, 2015July 16, 2015Leave a comment

Australian resident artists Willoh S. Weiland and Halcyon Macleod share their third blog post about their Fresh Milk residency. This week, Willoh explored different sides of Barbados, as she made field recordings around the island including along the rugged East coast. She not only reflects on the island’s multifaceted geography, but on the diversity of the women they have interviewed, and what constitutes the ‘right’ for someone to claim Bajan or Caribbean heritage. Read more below:

Why do white people like to hunt ghosts?

This Buzzfeed article made me laugh out loud. I think many of us are guilty of at least a few of these, including loving attics and hunting ghosts. Halcyon is right now in Dominica looking for the traces/evidence of Jean Rhys while I have been driving around the island collecting field recordings, including the windmill turning slowly in the dark gardens of St. Nicholas Abbey, village dogs barking at night and the St Matthias Sunday church service. I’ve been listening to Bajan radio all the while, particularly the religious stations, which are clear about how you can get cast out of paradise and for what.

The Bathsheba area is on the East coast. You drive over the high hills in the centre of the island and then you start coming down steep, steep hills towards the Atlantic Ocean. There is nothing between this coast and the West coast of Africa. Named after a biblical adulteress, it is nestled on the wild coast, boulders strewn as if flung out by a giant having a tantrum long ago. It feels like an entirely different country. The challenge of evoking mystery and complex narratives through sound becomes evident. What is Bathsheba if I turn off my eyes?

The Bajan dialect is a pleasure to listen to. The accent is syrupy. You can hear West African, sometimes hints of the Scottish Isles and the humour coming thick and fast. It is so close and yet so completely different to Belizean Kriol. In Belize you ‘suk u teeth’, in Bajan you ‘steupse’.

In both places, the action of making that sucking sound of disdain, anger, indifference, of sexy banter – given there are many ways to ‘suk u teeth’ – relays a whole glorious sense of attitude.

In Belize, I remember my best-friend saying to me when I was talking to my Australian Mum, “why does it take you so long to say anything?” and it’s true. English seems laborious, as though it were made for stiff upper lips and long cloistered afternoons.

I have no Belizean blood and so being Belizean is a negotiation, determined not by me, but by the person I am speaking to. Were you born there? How long did you stay? Do you speak Kriol? All of these questions probe the unspoken right to a place.

This week we spoke to women born here in Barbados, but not raised here, who have returned from abroad, with different accents after some time living other lives. In the reverse situation where all your blood is from here, how is it to be treated as if you are foreign. They spoke of the peculiar ‘outsiderness’, of being considered American and sharing the delight of being able to whip back a response in dialect, and of the peculiar and mercurial sadness of leaving and coming home, over and over again.

“I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.” – Jean Rhys

One interview this week with a high-ranking member of the cultural sector (cue spy music) was particularly inspirational. She gave an impromptu monologue about the future she saw for islands like Barbados and all small economies that have become utterly dependent on tourism. A bleak scenario, where the supply chains are cut off, the meat from New Zealand is no longer coming, where we are hungry and can’t remember how to plant our own food. The picture she painted was not to instill fear but instead to illuminate what is unique to where we are, the stories we need to keep telling and ways in which we can give back to the places we inhabit. Everyone, quick! Go do something meaningful with your life! Cue dramatic ending.

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

Halcyon Macleod and Willoh S. Weiland’s Residency – Week 2 Blog Post

May 6, 2015July 16, 20152 Comments

Australian resident artists Willoh S. Weiland and Halcyon Macleod share the second blog post about their experiences on the Fresh Milk platform. Their interviews continued this week, speaking with a number of women based in Barbados to gather material for their collaborative project ‘Crawl Me Blood’, inspired by the Jean Rhys novel Wide Sargasso Sea. One of the sensitive topics touched on was the way race is talked about – or not talked about – in society, and the parallels that can be drawn between Barbados and Australia in that way. Read more below:

Our second week at Fresh Milk has been another full week of interviews, writing and research.

Memories of hot mangoes in Grandmother’s kitchen – the taste of summer; or the quiet power of Mahogany trees; or the unrepeatable magic of fire-roasted bread-fruit offered by a stranger on the beach and dipped in the salty sea. Thank you to the inspiring women we have spoken with this week who have shared their perspectives and captivating our senses with their stories (I went directly to the vegetable market and bought a bread fruit). It has been a privilege and a pleasure to meet with you and to talk.

We have had some great conversations with a range of Bajan women now and one of the discussions we are trying to have is about race. It seems agreed that nobody likes to talk about it, even though, in the words of one of the participants “It’s sitting right there, it’s just under the surface.” It seems it’s like trying to talk about both race and class in Australia – you don’t.

One of the women we spoke with this week, who moved to Barbados from Jamaica 30 something years ago, talked about a phone call she received from a friend, after she announced she was moving. Her friend playfully asked “So have you decided? Are you going to be Black or are you going to be white?” Because in a population that is 97% black and 3% white, though no one is talking about it, the women we have interviewed over the last fortnight all agree that mostly, black and white don’t mix. Though of course there are always exceptions.

In Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys locates the in-between of the white creole woman’s experience. This week, Annalee handed me a copy of White Skin, Black Kin: Speaking the Unspeakable, a publication which holds a series of essays by and about Joscelyn Gardner’s work. A Caribbean-Canadian artist, her work explores her white creole identity from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Not black, but not totally white either.

“She is not beke like you, but she is beke, and not like us either”
– Christophine talking about Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea

It is this liminal and uncomfortable zone that will provide rich material for the artwork we are creating, and also the parallels between the Australian and Caribbean experience.

This week I could feel the blood pressing up into the soles of my feet. I couldn’t go anywhere without thinking about the brutalities of the past and wondering what happened here, in this particular spot where I am standing now. Like visiting Hunte’s Garden (an absolutely stunning tropical garden) and having a rum in the 150 year old house, a former plantation (nobody mentions slavery but I am sure the group of tourists gathered on the verandah are all thinking about it). The garden is so beautiful, planted inside a collapsed cave on the former plantation, every available space has been planted and replanted with an impressive array of tropical plants, palms, heliconias, orchids – an ever evolving work of art, every centimetre thoughtfully cared for and maintained. The plantation on this site is over 300 years old and I marvel how the horrors of the past can sit so quietly, so politely and neatly inside the present moment.

It might just be my gothic temperament, but when I heard myself say to one of the Bajan women I met this week “Everything is covered with blood” I immediately apologised for being dramatic. She replied “Yes it is. And that’s about the least dramatic thing you could possibly say.”

It’s old news I know. I feel like I’m meant to be reconciled with the horrors of the past and its seething. And of course I needn’t have come to the Caribbean to think on that, it’s a very Australian feeling, our dark colonial past alive and well in the present government’s attitude towards Aboriginal communities. Though, not to be too glum, it was energising and amazing to see in the news this week the strong protest responses from Australians to the forced closures.

It was both incredibly grounding and inspiring to hear Annalee talk about Phytoremediation and the foundations of Fresh Milk. Phytoremediation consists of mitigating pollutant concentrations in contaminated soils, water, or air, with plants able to contain, degrade, or eliminate toxins and contaminants. Like the human body turns blood into milk to nourish a new life, the Fresh Milk Art Platform creates a nurturing space for young artists on the site of the Walkers Plantation, turning blood into milk. Annalee Davis and her team have a response to the question of how are we to hold the bloody past in the present. This is how.

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

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.

‘A thought on Mediating Matter(s) in Arab and Caribbean Contemporary Art’ by Natalie McGuire

April 22, 2015May 21, 20151 Comment

Fresh Milk board member and contributor Natalie McGuire shares a review of the recent exhibition The Place of Silence at the Stal Gallery, Oman. While this show featured work by Middle Eastern artists, McGuire parallels their work with that coming out of the Caribbean, particularly between Iraqi-British artist Estabrak Al-Ansari and regional artists Nadia Huggins and James Cooper, all of whom deal with the materiality and implications of water as a medium. Read more below:

Stal Gallery, Muscat, Oman. Photo credit: Natalie McGuire.

Not work, taut, deaf, monotonous as a sea, endlessly sculpted—but
eruptions yielding to earth’s effervescence—that expose the heart, beyond
worry anguishes, to a stridency of beaches—always dislocated, always
recovered, and beyond completion—not works but matter itself through
which the work navigates—attached to and quickly discarded by some
plan—first cries, innocent rumors, tired forms—untimely witnesses to this
endeavor—perfectly fusing as their imperfections meet—persuading one to
stop at the uncertain—that which trembles, wavers, and ceaselessly
becomes—like a devastated land—scattered.

– Edouard Glissant, Poem for the World

Standing in the Stal Gallery, Muscat, in March 2015, the exhibition The Place of Silence exhumed an atmosphere so familiar to that of Caribbean art spaces. The works of six Middle Eastern artists commanded attention in the three enclave-spaced gallery, saturated in context and concepts that brought to mind Glissant’s phrase: “Not works, but matter itself through which the work navigates.” From Dada-inspired installations reviewing existence and death (Raiya Al Rawahi’s Life, Being and Death) to an unearthing of self-reflection, a photographic self-portrait mirrored and repeated almost to geometric abstraction (Ahmed Al Mullahi’s Gazing Through the Divine), there were challenging thoughts and narratives seeping through every pore of the walls. The exhibition was physically navigating through the matter of an upscale avenue in the heart of the city, sitting on Al Inshirah Street, a British Council Service Road.

Raiya Al Rawahi, Life, Being and Death (detail). Installation: photographs, IV bags/stands, headphones, charts. Stal Gallery, 2015.

One in particular was the piece Sayed, a component of the series ‘Omani’s Under Water’, by Estabrak Al-Ansari, an Iraqi-British new media artist and filmmaker, who is currently at the centre of a surging movement in Omani contemporary art. The photograph depicts an underwater view of half the figure of an Omani man in his dishdasha, submerged and poised on the reef. The white gown plays with being transparent in the sunlight that penetrates the water, and clings to the backs of his legs and lower torso. In the accompanying wall text, Al-Ansari emphasized her exploration of “taboo concepts such as sexuality, privilege, oppression, power and understanding.” By having the body of her subject submerged in water, in this realm of nature that becomes somewhat abstracted from the landscape of society, she can unpack the restraints around its presentation and movement. Implementing her concepts ‘under the surface’, the discourse she wishes to raise is mediated by this matter. For Sayed, no conservative Omani could accuse Al-Ansari of presenting him in an immodest manner; it was a natural reflection of the current of the ocean she photographed him in. She later stated, “I might direct a person, an image with my camera, but natural elements like water take over, and the element of the water plays with what I want to convey.”

Estabrak Al-Ansari, ‘Sayed’, Omani’s Under Water. Limited Edition Photographic Prints, Stal Gallery, 2015.

I had a chance to visit Al-Ansari at her sea-front studio in Al Bustan, and as she shared with me her thoughts about functioning in a Middle Eastern creative space, the familiarity of her new found artistic community with that of my own Caribbean one was undeniable.

Being her first exhibition in Oman, Al-Ansari believed some movements of the body encompassing a relationship with the sea would be acceptable for display outside of the water. At the opening of The Place of Silence, she presented her live projection painting piece Djinn and Motion. She explained:

Djinn is huge here. It’s in the Qur’an and states that Djinn do exist, it is like the ‘other’, a spiritual world. In countries there can be voodoo, and in Oman there is a big history of that. One reason why the title Djinn and Motion came to me is because I live by the sea within the mountains…and I have friends who refuse to visit me, because the belief is that the Djinn prefer to chill out by the sea, especially at night. Whether or not you believe in it is irrelevant, to me this is all myth and story, and this is the part I enjoy, that has been translated in all of my work.

Live projection painting originated in Al-Ansari’s London work with the group Thre3 Strokes, and stemmed from a desire to connect oneself and one’s viewers with an alternate space of reality. And although response to the medium was positive, the Muscat-based audience had difficulty accepting the title Djinn and Motion. Al-Ansari elaborates, “I had an interview with a guy from one of the newspapers here who was fine with discussing Omani’s Under Water, but as soon as I talked about Djinn and Motion he refused to talk to me, he walked away. He didn’t want anything to do with it. It was weird because for me, I was just normalizing what is here and what people talk about.”

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Jordan Clarke’s Residency – Week 4 Blog Post

April 20, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Barbadian-Canadian painter Jordan Clarke shares her fourth blog post about her Fresh Milk residency. In her final week, Jordan confronts some of the underlying reasons for her disconnect with the Barbadian side of her identity, and sees her experience in the island as a starting point to build on as she investigates this part of her culture and herself. Read more below:

“As is common to most transnational communities, the extended family – as network and site of memory – is the critical conduit between the two locations.” (Stuart Hall, ‘Thinking the Diaspora: Home – Thoughts from Abroad’, Caribbean Political Thought)

It is typically through family that Caribbean migrants are able to maintain a sense of connection to their Caribbean culture. What happens, however, when there isn’t a sense of cultural sharing through family? How does this affect one’s sense of cultural identity?

In my fourth week at Fresh Milk, I confronted the fact that my father has never been solidly present to share his cultural identity and family with me. I drew a self-portrait in response, with the intention of representing a conversation I would have with my father. A more confident me stares out, confronting.

I realize that the work I have created here during my residency represents a starting point for further investigation of the theme of self-perception, as well as self-discovery. It will act as a guide for future work once I’m home.

In thinking about the four weeks I’ve been here, I couldn’t be more grateful for this rewarding experience. Having such a wonderful studio to work in, without the usual daily distractions, has been refreshing and inspirational. Fresh Milk’s extensive library, full of contemporary Caribbean literature and art publications, has been an invaluable tool for informing my work here. I can’t thank both Annalee Davis and Katherine Kennedy enough for all their help and support. Annalee is full of knowledge and has been able to point me in directions I showed interest in, while leaving me space to navigate my art practice. I would also like to thank Aaron Kamugisha for his help and good company.

It has been so stimulating to connect with all the artists who have visited Fresh Milk during my residency. I see my time here as a starting point, a spark that will encourage further exploration and dialogue in my art practice.

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