In the third week of her Fresh Milk residency, Toronto-based artist Nadijah Robinson writes about her progress so far, shifting her focus from necessarily being on production to absorbing as much as she can from the experience, gathering information from a number of sources and letting things unfold in an organic way. Read more below:

This week was spent doing the most. Looking back on it, I have no reason to feel like I haven’t been doing enough.

This week I made some progress on the piece I am working on, the background is coming together slowly but surely. I know this piece is somehow about the land’s memory, but I am still unsure of the specifics.

I’ve decided to focus my energy on gathering as many resources and impressions as possible before I leave, rather than trying to know what I want to do specifically with them. It doesn’t seem like the most intentional way to go about this, but it seems like the best way to make the most of my remaining time here.

Early in the week, I attended Rayanne’s presentation to 3^rd year art students at BCC. Meeting the students and participating in their discussion around different ways they felt under-represented in the Barbados narrative, society, or their early school years was eye-opening. That this experience is as common amongst these students as it is amongst my own peers in Toronto speaks to the ever present power dynamic that dictates who writes our histories, who frames the narrative, who has set up the norms we resist. These days I am preoccupied with the question of what story I end up living in/living out, and how much control I have over that story. Much of my education work, community and art work are born out of a reaction to a traumatic and white-supremacist teaching of history (at all levels of my schooling) and the daily experience of racism. These frame my understanding of everything. If I wasn’t preoccupied with trying to heal from this, then what else might I be doing? It often feels like a trap, to be consistently resisting a belief system so large and entrenched, to be trying to create small alternative visions and truths here and there. I know, in my more optimistic moments, that it is necessary work, and it is my generation’s work to be doing.

I went to the museum on Thursday, and was disappointed with the narrative that was presented to me. I shouldn’t have been, but the level of gloss applied over a violent history was glaring to me. Emancipation in many historical narratives is continually presented as a time where white people suddenly came to the realization that slavery was morally reprehensible and decided to give black people their freedom (in exchange for compensation, and after a period of “apprenticeship”).

Friday morning made up for my disappointment as I got an amazing tour of plants around Barbados with Anthony Richards. I learned so much of Barbados/Caribbean history through plants and much about of the magic and symbolism of certain plants for different peoples. I made friends with a giant baobab tree of approximately 1000 years, a calabash tree, a black willow tree, and a giant silk-cotton tree. We spoke of mourning and burial beliefs and traditions, which because I live within the spectre of black death in North America, holds particular interest and urgency to me now. We also visited a number of historical sites, like the site of a mass grave that was found at the ports where slave ships used to come in, but which is now a parking lot, with no signs or markings to commemorate those lives or deaths. This tour is something I will most likely mull over for a long time.

Later that day and over the next couple days I visited the national archives, got lost and cranky, went on a driving tour with my cousins and saw the Animal Flower Cave and Little Bay on the north east coast, and went on a challenging (for me) 3 hour hike with my cousin and the Barbados Hiking Association starting at Long Beach.

What I’m reading these days is a mix of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed to relax, Stuart Hall’s text Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’  Between the World and Me. All of these are brilliant.

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This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Toronto-based artist Nadijah Robinson shares her second blog post about her Fresh Milk residency. She shares some of the struggles she has been having this past week, including beginning to reconcile feelings of longing for the Caribbean and displacement she has felt living in Canada with the reality of being in Barbados, and how this will manifest in her work. Read more below:

Unsettled. This week I got the flu. The week flew by, being on a few different cold and flu medicines and an antihistamine, much of it is a blur of trying to maintain a normal schedule, rest, stay hydrated and hope that it wasn’t dengue fever or chikungunya that I caught.

I’m starting to get homesick, which is an interesting feeling to get here. Homesickness is such a familiar feeling to get in Toronto, to long for a place that feels more affirming of your culture and identities, and feels safe and nourishing. As a second generation immigrant, sometimes that feeling is a cosmic joke. Plane tickets cannot take you to such a mythical destination. This longing is what much of my art centers on, along with the ever-present anti-black racism that is a part of my every day. More on that later.

I started making work. In a bit of a frustrated state at losing momentum due to being a human being vulnerable to viruses and attractive to mosquitoes, I decided to just start on something. I’m not sure what it is yet, but it is a collage/painting mixed media work.

I’m becoming aware of how much time there is left, that I am half way through my residency at Fresh Milk, and that I am two weeks closer to having to return to the beginning of winter in Toronto. This realization has me putting the pressure on in terms of making work, and doing research, but also getting down to the business of going to the beach. Not to mention that I was recommended the remedy of taking a sea bath by more than a few people. Rayanne and I spent this Saturday at the very calm Brandon’s Beach, which proved to me that Barbados is a blessed place. The water’s so warm; until now I had assumed that my distant memories of warm natural waters were something I’d invented, as every river and lake I’ve dipped my feet into in Ontario has left my feet numb.

This week, I’ve been struggling with how the stark difference of my surroundings here is producing ideas and themes for me that don’t directly relate to my context in Toronto. I worry (a bit) about producing work that will be an exception in my wider art practice. But at the core of this is the guilt that I’m not feeling the same level of urgency around my own and my people’s survival. I am still constantly receiving updates and new news about murders and police killings via social media, but no one around me is reacting. As Toronto heads into the coldest/hardest season, and as Canada heads into an extremely scary federal election on Monday, I’m at the beach and in the studio. It feels unfair. But this is something I’m currently trying to reconcile, allowing myself the space and time to focus on making work that is genuine, un-rushed, and about whatever it needs to be about.

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This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.