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.

Simone Asia’s Residency – Week 3 Blog Post

May 4, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Simone Asia, current artist in Fresh Milk’s 2015 ‘My Time’ Local Residency programme, shares her third blog post. Other commitments and time constraints impacted Simone’s progress this week, but she continued to seek inspiration, brainstorm and churn out ideas, which she anticipates bringing to life as she continues her residency. Read more below:

The third week is now over and I feel like I did not do anything; it feels as though I spent less time on site this week than I did last week, and my hectic days still continue. I found myself having to rush from Fresh Milk most days to go to the University of the West Indies (UWI) because I was assisting my friend and fellow artist, Versia Harris, in painting sets for the graduating theatre students. It was a job that came up at the last minute, but being independent artists, we have to do things like this so we can earn income. It was really hard because I do not drive and I had to travel by bus. By car, UWI is close, but by bus it takes a while because you have to go into Bridgetown then take another bus.

There were two bank holidays this week as well – Heroes Day on Tuesday and Labour Day on Friday. However, I came to the farm on both days because I needed to make up for lost time. I did not do as much as I would have liked, but I managed to finish most of the portrait. I was also behind on emails and other work I had to do outside of UWI and Fresh Milk.

I wanted to start some more pieces because I still brainstormed and wrote a lot of ideas despite my limited time. Other plans included a wall drawing, but I am feeling hesitant about that now. I feel as though I need to act on my ideas before my brain explodes. This week was tiring.

My birthday fell on the 2^nd of May and due to all the overlapping projects, I did not have much time to relax and unwind. Despite feeling partially like a robot, I still found small moments of peace to admire nature when I was travelling on those busy days.

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.