Fresh Milk in partnership with Poinciana Paper Press and supported by the Panta Rhea Foundation are delighted to announce our second edition of the Lucayan Archipelago Residency which will commence in The Bahamas in January 2026.
In response to the critical need for exchange across creative and environmental ecosystems, this residency brings together creatives from the Caribbean to imagine and co-create a critical cultural dialogue with the environment and resources in The Bahamas through art and writing. Our two residents are Tracy Assing (Trinidad & Tobago) and Carol Sorhaindo (Dominica).
Tracy Assing is a writer, editor, filmmaker. She has spent several years working in various forms of media, and as a communications strategist. As a member of Trinidad’s indigenous community, working mainly in non-fiction, her work is aligned with sustainable ways of living and green strategies for survival. Assing produced, wrote and directed the first film on the subject of indigenous survival in the English speaking Caribbean, The Amerindians. Her essay, Unaccounted for, was the only non-fiction essay included in the Commonwealth Writers anthology, So Many Islands.
Assing has a passion for magazine and zine culture and has been involved in the development of several publications. She is also a poet, who uses photography in her work.
Carol Sorhaindo is a freelance visual artist with an MA in Creative Practice from Leeds College of Art, UK. Her diverse portfolio career includes interior design, community education and project development. The success of her art practice is built on a strong belief in the value of creative expression, nature and heritage awareness on mental wellbeing.
Inspiration is drawn from landscapes with a focus on Caribbean plants of economic and ethnobotanical interest. Carol lives in Dominica after many years of residing in the UK. Her migration story and entangled roots inform her reflective Art practice. Research is centrally contextualized through mindful exploration of natural plant-based dyes and earth pigments on textiles, drawing, painting, print making, installation and journaling.
Together, Tracy and Carol while based in Nassau will explore some of the family islands of this 700-coral island archipelago, meet with contemporary visual artists and writers, ecologists, and environmentalists to understand the ecological reality of the Lucayan Archipelago that sits within the Atlantic Ocean. We can hardly wait to see what emerges from this collaboration!
About Fresh Milk:
Fresh Milk is an artist-led, non-profit organisation founded in 2011 and based in Barbados. It is a platform which supports excellence in the visual arts through residencies and programmes that provide Caribbean artists with opportunities for development, fostering a thriving art community. Fresh Milk offers professional support to artists from the Caribbean and further afield and seeks to stimulate critical thinking in contemporary visual art. Its goal is to nurture artists, raise regional awareness about contemporary arts and provide Caribbean artists with opportunities for growth, excellence and success.
About Poinciana Paper Press:
Located in the capital of the archipelagic nation of The Bahamas, Poinciana Paper Press provides opportunities to engage with books and their allied crafts to empower people to share their narratives in a region that has historically erased, marginalized, and exploited the culture and lived experiences of its inhabitants.
Bahamian writer and artist Sonia Farmer created Poinciana Paper Press as an independent book publisher in 2010, releasing handmade limited-edition chapbooks and artists’ books of Caribbean poetry, short stories, and experimental writing. Her vision is to advance the diversity of narratives and publishing modalities in The Caribbean.
In 2022, she established Poinciana Paper Press as the first Center for Writing, Book Arts & Publishing in The Bahamas—arguably, in the wider Caribbean—to expand this vision, developing visibility in the literary and book arts from within the Caribbean cultural ecosystem.
A major collaborator in the literary and visual arts communities in the region, Poinciana Paper Press facilitates programming aligned with its mission by providing opportunities to engage with the form of the book and its allied crafts of writing, bookbinding, letterpress printing, handmade paper, printmaking, book design, and calligraphy. This includes workshops, community outreach and engagement, exhibitions, publications, and residencies.
About Panta Rhea Foundation:
Mission: To catalyze a just and sustainable world through food sovereignty, community power building, and grassroots liberation around the globe.
The Panta Rhea Foundation (PRF) was established in 2001 as a private foundation devoted to researching issues and analyzing the operations, goals and potential of organizations committed to building a more just and sustainable world. The Foundation advises individual donors and other charitable entities on grantmaking strategies and specific grants.
We believe that lasting, authentic change must come from the grassroots; from the organized efforts of people and organizations to enliven the social imagination and envision a better future, to experiment with new ideas, and to hold elected leaders and corporations accountable to the communities they serve.
Our foundation name, Panta Rhea, is inspired by Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. It roughly translates to “You never step into the same river twice” or “All things change, all things flow”—suggesting both inherent constancy and change as a fundamental of life itself.
fresh milk barbados 