Rayanne Bushell’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

October 13, 2015October 13, 2015Leave a comment

During October 2015, Rayanne Bushell – a Glasgow-based artist of Jamaican and Barbadian descent – is volunteering with Fresh Milk, working with our archive of documentation and images from the last four years of activities. In her first blog, she shares what it has been like to experience Barbados for the first time in fourteen years, visiting family and reflecting on the personal archives we accumulate in life, while reckoning with the history of the space.

I have to admit that when I dreamed of returning to my ancestral home, until very recently, it was never Barbados that I had in mind. I lived with my mother and so while objectively I knew I had Bajan heritage and had even visited with my father in 2001, it had always been my Jamaican side that I clung to. In hindsight, I wonder why I never explored my Bajan heritage further. My grandmother who was born here is also one of my closest friends. But I guess I knew more about Jamaican history and culture and my family’s life there, so it was easier to claim.

In the end it was art that brought me back to Barbados. In the summer of 2014 I was struggling with and against a homogenous, white, eurocentric arts education, institution and history. Around this time I met Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden of the curatorial duo Mother Tongue when they gave a lecture at the Glasgow School of Art on Maud Sulter and Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé, two artists who were absent from the “Glasgow Miracle” narrative despite being active, based in Glasgow and exhibiting widely at the time. Sulter is a huge influence to me and is part of what inspires my small endeavours into countering the continued under-representation of black and person of colour artists in the West. Mother Tongue have been a wonderful support of my research and practice, and it is through them that I found out about International Artists Initiated at the David Dale Gallery, a programme of exhibitions and events that coincided with the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth games. Fresh Milk was one of the six participating artist organisations and upon seeing that they were based in Barbados, I contacted Annalee. As a result, I ended up assisting in the install and photographing of the exhibition and ultimately started a chain of events which led me to Monday at Grantley Adams International Airport, looking up at huge poster of Rihanna welcoming me to Barbados.

Zine by Rodell Warner and graphic novel by Beyond Publishing

On Tuesday, Katherine and Natalie showed Nadijah and I the Fresh Milk studio and offered a brief introduction to the Colleen Lewis Reading Room where I found two zines that I hope to add to my POC Zine Archive. Explorations of the reading room for my own research come at intermittent breaks from working through the Fresh Milk archive over the following few days. Through the process of organising and cataloguing thousands of files from various projects such as Tilting Axis, Fresh Performance and the Caribbean Art Map, I’ve been able to familiarise myself with the work that Fresh Milk does and so have a greater sense and understanding of the contemporary artistic activity on the island and wider Caribbean region. Sorting through folders relating to artists both international and local who have undertaken residencies at Fresh Milk has been an informative and inspirational process which also led to a continuous sense of déjà vu when I met members of the creative community irl when we attended the opening of Russell Watson’s Phylum at the Morningside Gallery at BCC.

After 5 days on Walker’s Dairy, Nadijah and I used the weekend as a chance to see a bit more of the island. Friday night was spent at Oistins. My father insisted I should go and it turned out to be a site quite relevant to my current research around tourism, souvenirs and authenticity. On Saturday, we wandered through Bridgetown, attempted to visit the Nidḥe Israel Synagogue and managed to avoid the worst of the rain.

Photographs on the wall of Rayanne's family's home

Today, we both visited our respective families on the Island. Sunday bus services are a joke no matter where you are in the world, after waiting 50 minutes, I made it to my great uncle’s house in Black Rock, St Michael where my grandad is also staying. Lunch with familiar faces was a welcome change after a week of firsts. Hanging on the walls of my uncle Derwin’s house are an odd but complimentary mix of family photos, art prints and souvenirs. It’s started me thinking again about the photo album as artefact, family home as a living museum and the home-maker as curator. I’m not yet sure where it’ll lead this time, but the environment had me obsessively taking photographs which wasn’t happened in a while.

I’ve been here 6 days, if I’m honest the greatest cultural conflict thus far, is the transition from city life to country living. Fresh Milk is situated on Walker’s Dairy, a farm that used to be a plantation. I understood what this would mean in theory, but in practice I wasn’t quite prepared for the lizards, frogs, cockroaches or mixed emotions conjured up from my location on a plantation; and reflections on my ancestors’ exponentially more violent experience of such a locale. There’s a lot to make sense of and get used to, I doubt 4 weeks is enough but I’ll take what I can get before returning to a no doubt grim Glasgow in November.

Nadijah Robinson’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

October 12, 2015November 2, 2015Leave a comment

Fresh Milk is pleased to be hosting Toronto-based artist Nadijah Robinson for the month of October 2015. Take a look at her first blog post about her residency, which has seen her reconnecting with her Bajan heritage and reflecting on what that means, both personally and for her practice. Read more below:

first day, no wifi
a little panic
beautiful skies, at sky mall,
the sky was immense
saw a tiny lizard at the entrance to my bedroom
it crawled up the door frame

on the drive to fresh milk, i saw a sign that said The Pine, in St. Micheal. That’s where my fam grew up, I think.

this week I’ve been thinking about my self being here in this place.

i’m very visible here. when we landed, i remembered that i look like a hipster. i’m being watched by myself as well. having the time and space to think, and live in my head full-time, and absorb absorbabsorb and then reflect reflectreflect feels a lot, at times, like navel-gazing. we are taught that this kind of self-indulgence is not to be encouraged. this is the first time, in a long time, that I’ve had this much time to devote to my practice.

i spent most of the week reading and writing, taking pictures, and making notes.

the first night, around the table with wine and Rayanne, Natalie, and Katherine (the latter two Fresh Milk staff members), i was asked what kinds of things I’m interested in learning or exploring, so they could facilitate me reaching the right resources.

what i said was something like

– talking to my family, and their understanding of their identities as bajans
– plants and traditional uses of plants that grow here
– the history of Barbados

what i meant was something different like

– i want to understand what bajan means to different people, how the diaspora relates to that and whether they share my sense of lack, void, and longing to fill in all the historical gaps and wasteland.
– my body’s composition is part bajan, for at least a few generations. my body is allergic to most things in Canada: grass, flowers, trees, pollen, nuts, wheat, sometimes the fruit. i want to know what home my body can find here. what relief, what therapy can be found in the plants, medicine.
– i want to know how long back my blood was here. what did it pick up along the way. why is the trauma so deeply felt. what traumas lie there (in the blood).

sometimes i feel like an ethnographer, because even though i am bajan, i am not from here. and so my first reading was Hal Foster’s “The Artist as Ethnographer” just to check that what I’m doing here isn’t ethnography. it raised interesting questions, but no answers for me, as I expected.

a morning was spent trying (unsuccessfully) to identify plants around the residency site. I had more luck looking up plants mentioned in my third reading, in my second reading, to see what they looked like and their descriptions and properties.

third reading: “The True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes 1657” by Richard Ligon… which was difficult, and I suspect not as “true and exact” as Ligon would have liked people to believe.

second reading: “Wild Plants of Barbados” by Sean Carrington

i’ve started to read this book of poetry “Barabajan Poems” by Kamau Brathwaite, and it is giving me life. poetry does to my brain, what no other things do. so far, Brathwaite’s describing his childhood but also leaving Barbados and living in England and how lonely and alienating that felt. how he was made to feel like bajan culture was lesser than, was something barbaric, and that he and his peers would only ever find acceptance and success in their craft elsewhere. a lot is resonating with me, despite our different experiences. i’ve only begun to read this book, so I’ll leave it there.

_______________________________________

This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Fresh Milk welcomes Rayanne Bushell and Nadijah Robinson to the platform

September 30, 2015September 30, 2015Leave a comment

Fresh Milk is excited to welcome Rayanne Bushell and Nadijah Robinson to the platform as our next artists in residence from October 5 – 30, 2015.

Rayanne, who we first connected with in Glasgow while participating in the International Artist Initiated project in 2014, will be volunteering at Fresh Milk and working with our growing archive of images, while Nadijah, a Canadian artist of Barbadian heritage, will be reconnecting with her extended family to explore her roots and the notion of ‘home’ in Barbados through her artistic practice, including using mixed media collage and fabric work.

About Rayanne:

Rayanne Bushell is a Black British visual artist currently based in Glasgow. Bushell’s work uses photography, text and various printing techniques to reconstruct her family history, using this as a prism through which to investigate post-colonial identities, christianity and community. Research into the history of Black arts in Britain and the lack of representation of Black artists underpins Bushell’s practice; in November 2014 she founded Motherlands a zine for POC artists and writers and in August 2015 she started a pop-up POC Zine Library.

Motherlands was recently included in Visions of the Future: Women, Publishing & Autonomy, Islamic Human Rights Centre, London 2015. In 2015 Bushell collaborated with artist Isaac Kariuki on Shft+Ctrl+Save exploring how marginalised people utilise the internet and social medias as means of creating safe spaces and communities,Shft+Ctrl+Save was shown at Meta Gallery, Miami in May 2015.

About Nadijah:

Nadijah Robinson is an artist and educator based in Toronto, currently working in the media of Collage, Painting, Performance and Installation. She received her BFA from the University of Ottawa and a BEd from OISE University of Toronto. Working with skills developed from practices such as sewing, silkscreen printing, batik making, filmmaking, collage, painting, and graphic design, her work combines what is needed to construct a particular affecting image, object or experience. A refusal of the premise of a white canvas, or a blank slate, the use of found fabrics, images and other materials acknowledges that no thing comes from nothing. The history, cultural references, and sensory implications of the materials, and sources of the stories she tells all lend their particular significance to the larger artwork.

Nadijah Robinson’s work aims to reflect and archive the stories of communities in which she is strongly rooted, and which are not often represented in conventional art spaces. Through the practice of conducting interviews with community members, Nadijah is able to identify important themes, to highlight significant stories, and to learn directly from community members what they would like to see in artwork that presents itself as being for and about them.

Recent projects include a The Mourning Dress for Trans Black Women featured in Pride in Toronto 2015, a mural completed a mural as part of the Church Street Mural Project in preparation for World Pride 2014, and the curation of a photographic archive of Black musicians and entertainers from the 1930s-70s for the Archie Alleyne Scholarship Fund. She has shown work with the Art Gallery of York University, Gladstone Hotel, Daniels Spectrum, with Nia Centre for the Arts, and as part of the Mayworks Festival for Working People and the Arts.

Open Call: Fresh Milk International Residency 2015 or 2016

August 18, 2015August 19, 20151 Comment

FRESH MILK is seeking proposals from artists working outside of Barbados to apply for our international residency programme in late 2015 or Spring 2016. Available dates for the residencies to take place are between November 2 – 30, 2015 and February 29 – March 25, 2016.

This residency aims to support visual artists, writers and curators by offering a peaceful working space for a minimum of 4 weeks for creative production, the opportunity to interface with contemporary practitioners living and working in Barbados, access to the on-site Colleen Lewis Reading Room, the chance to broaden understanding of the work being produced locally and regionally in the Caribbean, and to strengthen international networks and relationships. For more information on the residency, application process and associated costs, please visit our International Residency Opportunity page.

The deadline for applications is October 2, 2015.

To see the blogs kept by our past International resident artists, click here.

Saada Branker and Powys Dewhurst – Week 4 Blog Post

July 28, 2015July 28, 2015Leave a comment

In the last blog post about their time in Barbados, Fresh Milk‘s international writer-in-residence Saada Branker fretted about missing out on the beauty of the country. Given all that she and filmmaker Powys Dewhurst encountered in the first few weeks on the island as they diligently collected information and footage for their documentary memory project commemorating Hurricane Janet’s 60th anniversary, the obvious had escaped her. Read more about her final revelations below:

Standing on serene farmland with no beaches in sight

“You cannot leave Barbados without eating your mango in the sea.” I was told.

Experiencing such a rite of passage in my parents’ birthplace had me giddy. Before arriving in Barbados, I was all about the beach. I practically bragged to my Toronto girlfriends that I would interview and research everything I could find on the 1955 hurricane, but I also intended to make it out to sunbathe a couple times a week. “I’ll write daily, read, and relax on the beach,” I explained. “And I’m going to sketch—my feet in the sand and the waves rolling in.” Clearly, I was cocky in my delusion; as if there was only one place I could ground myself.

By our fourth week in the Fresh Milk residency, my ashy foot was still dry.

Scorched fields in St. John.

The rain fell heavy, but sporadically during our last week.

Truth told, on this residency, I was immersed in something deeper and more compelling than the thrill of only sun and sand. Being in landlocked St. George, I was walking in the country, divining dimensions of my environment and what it means to be touched by nature, yet humbled by our inability to control it. Case in point, the unknown series of events that resulted in a deluge of sargassum seaweed washing up along beaches in Christ Church and the East Coast —a hemorrhaging compared to what Barbados has received each year since 2011. Here was an inexplicable increase of the sea’s yield, which prompted the tourism sector to beg Mother Nature for mercy. Swimmers were wishing aloud for a quick return to the pristine beaches and crystal clear waters. Amid the frustration and near panic, the inquisitive Barbadians started asking what long-term environmental benefits could be gleaned from the endless mounds of foul-smelling seaweed. Could the sargassum help prevent soil erosion? Could it enrich agricultural soil as fertilizer?

At the start of our last week, the rain fell like currency from the sky. “Since January!” This exclamation was the outburst we’d often hear from Barbadians as they revelled in the close to a six-month dry season. For me and Powys, the first downpour dampened our mood because we had to reschedule two interviews that day. Any filming outdoors was a no-go. There were reports of flooding in certain areas, and one of our interviewees called to reschedule when her balcony accumulated too much rain water—the same spot she intended to have us set up. As the much-needed moisture soothed the scorched earth, I realized how narrow my perspective was about “good weather.” With the gift of raindrops, moods lifted. Bajans spoke of the daily drenching with appreciation. Again, I had been looking at it all wrong.

My narrow perspective about to change.

Not put out. Bajans took pleasure in seeing their yards, gardens, animals and crops quenched.

Our Hurricane Janet chase was really was about exploring these environmental gifts handed from nature along with the losses reaped. People we interviewed opened their homes to us and shared their gems. When the camera recorded, they spoke almost dutifully of childhood memories and family life, describing how Hurricane Janet fit within the layers of their experiences. After the filming, one host offered us freshly squeezed lemonade, compliments of the trees in her beloved yard. Days before leaving, we received a warm loaf of home-made coconut bread from another host. She surprised us the week earlier with the most scrumptious zucchini bread I’ve had in years. Another interviewee invited us back to her home for tea, and on that occasion she handed Powys two mangos picked from a tree in her garden.

Anita Daniel with a gem from her lush garden.

Fresh-squeezed lemonade, compliments of Anita Daniel,

Incredibly tasty coconut bread, compliments of Barbara Davis.

The spirit of generosity was also present within the country’s institutions and businesses. Sitting at Barbados Government Information Service, we reviewed silent, black-and-white footage of Hurricane Janet’s aftermath. In it, forlorn Barbadians sifted through debris. I was reminded of the weakness of our constructed environment. The displaced families living in schools for weeks on end revealed a disturbing reality about the impact of a Category-3 hurricane on the economy. As Tara Inniss of UWI’s history and philosophy department explained on camera, a natural disaster like a tropical storm exposes “the deficiencies” in a country’s infrastructures. In Barbados sixty years ago, those vulnerable spots would be found in housing, fisheries and communications, especially involving hurricane preparedness.

St. George Parish Church.

Lynn Lucas and Felton Ince of Barbados Government Information Service, Photo by Powys Dewhurst.

To be standing in the sea’s rolling waves today, indulging one’s senses in the sweet juices of a much-revered fruit, is not a bad indoctrination at all. It conjures that heady spell we fall under, gazing at our environmental geography in all its beauty. Such exquisite gifts of nature often have us assuming they will always be there independent of humankind’s interference or incompetence. But times are cyclical in nature. During an economic downturn it becomes even more important to cultivate, protect and preserve our environment with the respect it deserves, and inevitably demands, as Barbados learned late September in 1955.

Final days.

I did indulge in my gift of a mango picked from a yard tree. But instead of the sea, I sat eating my fruit on Fresh Milk’s studio platform minutes before we started a workshop on writing. It was my private moment to receive and give thanks. There on farmland, I got to pass my own rite—forever touched by the countryside’s warm breeze and cacophony of earthly melodies.

Our very special thanks to Andrea King, Janice Whittle, Charles Phillips, Natalie McGuire, Top Car Rentals Barbados, Barbados Government Information Service, Barbados Museum & Historical Society, Above Barbados, The National Cultural Foundation of Barbados, The University of West Indies History and Philosophy Department, Southern Rentals Barbados, St. George Parish Church, ArtsEtc, and Fresh Milk Barbados for their contributions and for facilitating our interviews during our stay.