Category: Residency

Mark King’s Residency – Week 4 Report

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The final week found me producing an origami piece while circling back to the work that was in pre-production before arriving at Fresh Milk. After returning to the previous work it became clear that there was a narrative running through the series. Convertibles Are Better Than Warrants had grown legs.

What I thought was to be the simplest of the three origami pieces turned out to be the most challenging. By Thursday I had spent an entire week on it. Moments after drawing the last line it was hanging on the wall next to the targets and other folded pieces. It reads: If They Can Fog A Mirror; Fund ‘Em. The Triptych is titled, If They Can Fog A Mirror Fund ‘Em A Piece of Shit.

Friday morning involved presenting to a group of curators and other creative industry folk from Brazil, Barbados, and the UK at Fresh Milk. A small group of contemporary Barbadian artists made up of Ewan Atkinson, Janelle Griffith, Shanika Grimes, Katherine Kennedy, Fresh Milk founder Annalee Davis and myself spoke for a few minutes about our creative process and current projects.

The following day I ran a portraiture workshop with the Graydon Sealy Secondary School’s photography club as part of my community outreach through Fresh Milk. Although I’ve been teaching photography to university students for the past few years, this was the first time running a workshop for kids; not early 20 somethings. They really got into the work of Vivian Maier and Cindy Sherman. But understandably they were most interested in taking photos than talking about them. I’ll make sure to share a few of their photos in a later post.

I stopped by Barbadian designer and good friend, Elena Branker’s studio yesterday to pick up the garment we collaborated on for the project. It’s a tan linnen vest featuring 20 pockets where Bear Stearns playing cards rest. I think of it as part magician/drug mule/suicide bomber vest.

Fresh Milk marks my third artist residency. Last summer I did a 2 week residency at Alice Yard in Port Of Spain, Trinidad and in February/March of 2011 I took part in a 3 week screen printing residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium. My residency experiences serve as reminders that I’m on the right track. Nothing makes me happier than creating new work in a supportive environment free of distraction.

Massive thanks to the Fresh Milk team for being amazing hosts. You have inspired me to one day create my own treehouse studio with an abundance of coffee and banana bread.

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Mark King’s Residency – Week 2.5 Report!

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Mark King experiments with origami

The idea came to me while lying awake in bed staring at the dusty ceiling fan. My ah ha moment birthed a typographical algorithm for each piece I was to create. I quickly found a need to measure every pen stroke as I got down to sketching the first draft.

I began with a base fish fold. Then took on the frog fold. I practiced. And practiced.   First on 8.5″ x 8.5″ office paper and later graduated to 17″ x 17″ thicker student grade paper. The base fold patterns really intrigued me. The symmetry and the creased thick paper felt right. Thin origami specialty paper is normally used for the folds. But I wanted to go with thicker paper for a more strained pattern.

The first piece, Triple-A, consists of the letter “A” mirrored and repeated. The piece on the right reads, Piece Of Shit. The diptych refers to the triple-A rating Bear Stearns’ mortgage backed securities received from the rating agency, Moody’s. The firm referred to these as a Piece of Shit in internal emails.

The slightest lapse would wipe away 4+ hours of progress. This happened so many times. I’ve had a lot on my mind recently and this is part of the reason why I took on making origami patterns in the first place. It’s a cathartic process.

What I created this past week.5 is oddly in line with the targets that I brought to the residency already in production. In working out of Fresh Milk’s studios I am surrounded by an ocean of fractals. Repeating patterns are everywhere. It provides amazing inspiration for where this series is going. Maybe this is the common thread holding everything together.

Mark King’s Residency – Week 1 Report

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Mark King experiments with origami

I was greeted by Versia Harris knocking out work in the studio to the sounds of a very eclectic playlist on the first day of the Fresh Milk Residency. I carved out a space in the reading room to get started and laid out my supplies.

I came in with an on-going project in mind. One that centers around the recent financial crisis and banking scandals of our time. The project has taken my work in new directions. And I have yet to make a photograph. I will continue down this path of exploration for the month that I am here.

Week one was more about feeling out the space. Creating from the heart of the Barbadian countryside is unlike anything I have experienced. Birds, wind chimes, cows, roosters, and rustling leaves make up the soundscape. It’s the perfect creative incubator.

The environment is also great for failing. Something I’m really enjoying during this residency. I brought a book with me from home on Origami that I had been meaning to try out for a while. Craft isn’t my strong suit, which gives me more reason to play with the medium. Origami takes a high level of concentration and its pursuit guarantees failure. It’s humbling to go through a stack of paper when trying the simplest folding pattern.

Things are starting to come together. Outside of the studio space I continue to work on the pieces that were in pre-production leading up to the residency. Leaving new work to be explored while in the Fresh Milk studio.

I’m here until mid April. If you’re on island stop by and say hi.

Versia Harris’ Residency – Week 4 Report

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One of the students at St. Gabriels drew a picture of Versia

This week was the wrapping up of the animation I have been doing for the past month. On Monday, I went to St. Gabriel’s Primary School to talk with the students of J4 about Walt Disney animations in a similar way to the discussion I had with the students of Workman’s Primary. The J4 students showed a keen interest in the Walt Disney films, as expected, but they also had high interest in animation making. Some of them even produced some pretty cool animated stories and flip books.

The rest of the week went relatively quietly, as I edited images and added sound to my work. Mark King started his residency this week and Aaron Kamugisha came to visit and have a chat with me about my work on Thursday.

At the start of this residency, I had set out to relax myself and experiment with something new in my animation. This process has not been without hiccups and bumps along the way. At the very beginning, I didn’t really have a concrete idea but soon progressed to having multiple ideas and not being sure which direction to take. And then, as I solidified my concept, the technical difficulties started. But all of these things were expected. I know now that the process of the animation is not easily compressed into such a small amount of time and so when the inevitable hiccups do come along it takes away from the progress of the work. But overall, I feel satisfied with what I’ve done even though I’m sure that I have just scratched the surface of a topic that could be explored a lot further and given a lot more consideration. The animation produced is a little over a minute long, in which I attempted to portray the tug of war between the physical world and the internet by presenting a series of contrasts. One of the ultimate questions arising was this: “In what ways does one realm pull our minds away from the other and to what extent?” And though I am not certain that I will continue this project in this particular way, I am glad that I did start to explore this area even if for such a short while.

This residency has been a much appreciated gauge for me in terms of experiencing how a one month long residency goes. I am about to embark on my first international residency for 4 weeks in Vermont, USA. I am aware that not all situations are created equal and the month I spend in Vermont could turn out to be completely different, but I do feel more prepared for the challenge of handling limited time.

I want to specially thank Annalee Davis, the director Fresh Milk and Katherine Kennedy, the Assistant to Director, for the opportunity and for supporting and assisting me along the way.

Versia Harris’ Residency – Week 3 Report

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A visit to Workman’s Primary School as a part of my Community Outreach, kick started week three of my residency. I formulated a few questions and went with the intention of having a conversation with the students of class 4 about their thoughts and feelings on Disney films and characters, and also about the prominence of television in their daily lives. It was a first for me, interacting with that number of kids in that setting; I’m not very up to date on what the kids of today are like. However, they were surprisingly pleasant and very cooperative. In between the humor and fun that I had talking to these children, the answers to my questions were a mixture of the expected and unexpected. They gave me some insight into how they saw these films and how much they actually watched TV. Granted, this was only a class of about fifteen students, a number too small to be projected across the generation but they do watch a lot more TV than I did at that age. To them, watching TV was on par, if not more desired, with going outside to play. This relates to the concept of my animation about the push and pull between the physical world and the virtual one.

Later in the week Alicia Alleyne and Shanika Grimes came to the studio, along with my usual company of Katherine Kennedy. Even though each of us was set to our individual tasks and projects, I was glad for the company and the conversations. Sheena Rose and Mark King also came out to see my progress and to give feedback.

Through the laughter, the heated discussions and the dismantling of Annalee Davis’ work – which by the way took four people, two days and a lot of effort – this week also brought me some challenges with my work. Technological malfunctions are inevitable. But the despair of a program breakdown is magnified when it is your primary source of work. Obviously, working with technology for at least a year and half now, I expect it to malfunction or an important program to suddenly stop working, and yet after all this time it doesn’t get any less frustrating, especially when it hinders progress within the short period of time that I have. In any case all is restored and the animation continues.

Still from one of Versia's new animations