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.

100,000 views!

April 29, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

The Fresh Milk website has now had over 100,000 views! Our team sends gratitude to everyone who has shown interest in and continues to follow our activities. We promise to keep sharing our work and that of the talented creatives we support.

Much more to come!

Guest #CCF Review: Purple Hibiscus

April 29, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Purple Hibiscus (2003) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie follows the story of Kambili, a young girl growing up in a strict household dominated by her father, a wealthy Catholic in post-independent Nigeria. Kambili’s father has created an isolated environment in which she, her brother Jaja, and their mother, Mama, are to live. Controlling by fear and punishment, Papa uses the severe interpretation of the Bible and Catholicism that he received in colonial Nigeria as a way to maintain order in the compound. The novel takes place during a time in Nigeria when the country is falling into civil disorder.

The above excerpt is from our recent resident artist Jordan Clarke’s guest review of Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this week’s addition to the Fresh Milk Books Tumblr – the online space inviting interaction with our collection in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room.

For new Critical. Creative. Fresh reviews, look out for our #CCF responses and see the great material we have available at Fresh Milk!

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.