Tilting Axis Collections and Commissioning Fellowship 2019

March 3, 2019March 20, 2019Leave a comment

The Tilting Axis Fellowship is a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meetings in 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados, in 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and in 2017 at The National Gallery of the Cayman Islands. For its 2019 iteration, Scotland based cultural partners including the Glasgow School of Art, The School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, CCA Glasgow, LUX Scotland, Hospitalfield and curatorial duo Mother Tongue have come together to offer support for a research fellowship to Scotland for an emerging contemporary art practitioner living and working in the Caribbean to share knowledge about current approaches towards commissioning and collecting in the arts.

For Whom?

Curators, researchers, artists, or cultural producers based in the Caribbean region who want to make new links in Scotland and have a keen interest in developing their curatorial practice. Applicants must have a working knowledge of English.

Goals

Develop, stimulate, support, and visualise curatorial and artistic realities coming from the Caribbean region;
Facilitate face-to-face communication in Scotland;
Offer free and open access to knowledge and practices;
Provide a stable platform for professional experiences;
Produce critical knowledge on educational tools as well as visual culture;
Focus on emerging practices;
Utilise the existing Tilting Axis network;
Offer practical support for the duration of the research trip in Scotland.

This Fellowship opportunity focuses on the development of pragmatic and critical curatorial and artistic practice hailing from the Caribbean region, and is research and practice-led, and mentor-based. The fellow will be invited to Scotland for up to one month from 1 October 2019 to undertake a period of open-ended research and development. Artists or curators may apply to undertake research for a mode of curatorial practice. The Fellowship is focused on alternative forms of Collections and Commissioning, in collaboration with partners across Scotland whose work focuses on various forms of collecting, archiving or supporting the development of artworks.

Within the Tilting Axis annual convenings, complexities of mobility, the politics of archiving, access and privilege, decolonisation, institutionalism, curatorial knowledge, pragmatics, and social realities have surfaced as keywords of urgency within Caribbean cultural ecosystems. We seek proposals that engage with the unique visual culture available in the Caribbean and what might be learned from its unexpected and innovative approaches. The Fellowship has an open-ended outcome, offering support for critical development of curatorial or artistic practice while giving a practical base within partner organisations to research different methodologies and institutional approaches.

Drawing on the specifics of the Caribbean region through processes of decolonisation, race, mobility, access and privilege and digitalisation, your proposal might approach actively how people live and work, and especially how contemporary art takes a responsibility to reflect and act on it. What are fears as well as potentials in these current times? Within such a complex geography, what are the challenges? What are the interventions? The Fellowship might support and expand these conversations on a mutual basis.

More information about each organisation’s core interests can be found below. It is expected that the Fellow will focus on a period of research with each organisation to mutually address some of these questions across the month-long residency.

The fellow will receive a fee of £1500 and a per diem to cover expenses and living costs whilst in Scotland. All travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the host partners. An itinerary of travel, meetings and public events will be arranged in collaboration with the successful applicant and partners, prior to the fellow’s arrival. The budget will be managed by the partners, and includes a winter clothing allowances of £300. The Fellow is also expected to participate in a public event or lectures in two or three Scottish locations, to share their knowledge, context and practice.

A contribution to the public blogs of British Council and CCA Glasgow as well as the Tilting Axis website will be required along with a final report on the Fellowship. Tilting Axis partners will work towards funding additional funds for the fellow to attend Tilting Axis 6, (location tbc) where the fellow can present on their experience.

Application

Applicants for the Fellowship are invited to develop an independent proposal outlining a clear interest in the issues and organisations highlighted. The proposal should be content driven and can be based on already existing research or offer new projects. The fellow is not expected to produce an outcome or finished artwork but will be expected to speak publicly about their ongoing research or interests whilst in Scotland.

Departing from a curatorial or artistic ambition, we expect to see a statement of intent of maximum 1000 words. This statement should explain the fellow’s research focus, respond directly to the keywords and thematics raised in the call out, and highlight reasons for visiting Scotland and/or the partner organisations. A separate artist/curatorial statement can also be supplied. Please also include a CV and two references, and an indication of availability from early October 2019.

The application should be submitted via e-mail to: Ainslie Roddick, CCA Glasgow Curator: ainslie@cca-glasgow.com.

The deadline for submission is 15 April 2019.

For more information on the fellowship and the partners, visit the Tilting Axis website here.

Nicole Smythe-Johnson announced as curator for the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship 2016

September 23, 2016September 26, 2016Leave a comment

Kingston-based curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson has been selected for this year’s Tilting Axis curatorial fellowship. Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, who has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection.

Congratulations, Nicole!

The curatorial fellowship is a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meetings in 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados and in 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Scotland based cultural partners CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery, Hospitalfield and curatorial collective Mother Tongue produced a structural long-term fellowship for an emerging contemporary art practitioner living and working in the Caribbean.

This new fellowship opportunity focuses on the development of pragmatic and critical curatorial development hailing from the Caribbean region, and is research and practice-led, and mentor-based. Designed as a year-long programme between the Caribbean region and Scotland, it offers support for critical development of curatorial practice and gives a practical base in the partner institutions with visits to Scotland and throughout the Caribbean.

During the fellowship, Nicole Smythe-Johnson will travel to Scotland in November, and will also undertake research visits to Suriname, Barbados, Cuba and Grenada. Smythe-Johnson said: “I am very excited about the fellowship. I attended the Tilting Axis conference this year in Miami and really savoured the opportunity to meet other arts professionals and hear about other institutions in the Caribbean region. I love my island, but island life can be isolating and there is a real temptation toward the insular. This fellowship then, is the perfect opportunity to build on the connections I made at TA 2016, and get some answers to the questions that came out of that experience. I can’t wait to jump in with both feet, starting with Glasgow.”

David Codling, Director of Arts for the Americas, British Council said: “In so many ways which are often overlooked, the Caribbean is the epicentre of the Americas: for better or worse Europe’s involvement with what it called the “New World” began in the Caribbean and for many European countries, including the four nations of the UK, our relationship with the Caribbean is deep, intense and complex. The British Council is proud to support and to be associated with the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship which offers an opportunity to explore and understand that relationship and to promote new conversations.”

Holly Bynoe, co-founder, Tilting Axis said: “In keeping with the notion of tilting the axis which refers to the re-focusing of our gaze and harnessing our collective power to make the visual arts sector more sustainable in ways that resonate with our lived realities in the Caribbean, the introduction of the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship is one example of how this might happen. Tilting Axis 2: Caribbean Strategies made significant strides in its aims to fortify networks and extend the reach of the arts throughout the Caribbean, with its partners in the Global North. I am delighted that the inaugural fellow is Nicole Smythe-Johnson and eagerly anticipate what will come of her research across the Dutch, Spanish, and Anglophone Caribbean, concluding in what I am sure will be a rich and stimulating experience in Scotland.”

The fellowship is in partnership with CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery and Studios, Hospitalfield, Mother Tongue and Tilting Axis. Supported by the British Council.

For more information, images or interviews, please contact Julie Cathcart, Communications Manager, CCA – julie@cca-glasgow.com / 0141 352 4911.

About Nicole Smythe-Johnson:

Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, living in Kingston, Jamaica. She has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection.

About CCA:

The Centre for Contemporary Arts is Glasgow’s hub for the arts. The building is steeped in history and the organisation has played a key role in the cultural life of the city for decades. CCA’s year-round programme includes cutting-edge exhibitions, film, music, literature, spoken word, festivals, Gaelic language events and performance. CCA also provides residencies for artists in the on-site Creative Lab space, as well as working internationally on residencies with Palestine, the Caribbean and Quebec. CCA curates six major exhibitions a year, presenting national and international contemporary artists, and is home to Intermedia Gallery showcasing emerging artists.

About Hospitalfield:

Dedicated to contemporary art and ideas, Hospitalfield is a place to work, study, learn, visit and enjoy. Hospitalfield is an artist’s house in Arbroath, on the east coast of Scotland, with a captivating cultural and social history that spans many hundreds of years. The contemporary arts programme is anchored in the visual art yet encourages interdisciplinarity, supporting the production of new work and providing space for debate and learning through residencies, a summer school and four public projects with new commissions each year. The organisation maintains strong national and international working partnerships with the aim of making Hospitalfield a meeting place and cultural catalyst in the working lives of artists, students and creative professionals in Scotland and far beyond.

About Mother Tongue:

Mother Tongue is a research-led, independent curatorial practice formed by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden. Since 2009, they have produced exhibitions, screening programmes, discursive events, essays and texts, working in partnership with galleries, museums, festivals, and publishers. Mother Tongue’s practice in exhibition-making intersects with research interests – including, but not limited to – post-colonialism, language, translation, heritage, identities, indigenousness, migration, and movement. They are currently researching the presence, work and exhibition histories of artists of colour in Scotland, working towards a future ‘AfroScots’ exhibition project.

About Tilting Axis:

Tilting Axis is a roving project conceptualised by ARC Magazine and the Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. The first iteration was hosted at Fresh Milk in Barbados in February 2015 under the banner Tilting Axis: Within and Beyond the Caribbean | Shifting Models of Sustainability and Connectivity. Tilting Axis 2.0 was hosted by the Pérez Art Museum Miami in February 2016. This meeting explored the current state of cultural work in the Caribbean, and aimed to fortify networks, increase administrative and programming capacities, as well as transfer knowledge and funding opportunities to those working in the region. The Tilting Axis Emerging Curatorial Fellowship developed out of the second iteration and the next edition of the meeting is slated to take place in April 2017, hosted by the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI).

About The British Council:

The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations. The British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide. We call this cultural relations. We build trust and understanding for the UK to create a safer and more prosperous world. In terms of our reach and impact, we are the world’s leading cultural relations organisation. Cultural relations is a component of international relations which focuses on developing people-to-people links and complements government-to-people and government-to-government contact. We use English, Arts, and Education and Society – the best of the UK’s great cultural assets – to bring people together and to attract partners to working with the UK. The British Council has over 7,000 staff working in 191 offices in 110 countries and territories.

Open Call: Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship Programme 2016

June 6, 2016June 6, 2016Leave a comment

As a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meetings in 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados and in 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Scotland based cultural partners CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery, Hospitalfield and curatorial collective Mother Tongue have come together to offer structural long-term support to an emerging contemporary art practitioner living and working in the Caribbean. This is a new fellowship opportunity that focuses on the development of pragmatic and critical curatorial development hailing from the Caribbean region, and is research and practice-led, and mentor-based. The fellow will receive a maximum of £5,000 towards travel, accommodation, and living costs. The fellowship is co-developed in partnership with British Council.

Designed as a year-long programme between the Caribbean region and Scotland, the fellowship will have an open-ended outcome. It offers support for critical development of curatorial practice and gives a practical base in the partner institutions, connected with the successful candidate’s proposal.

We seek proposals that engage with the unique visual culture available in the Caribbean and what might be learned from its unexpected and innovative approaches. The successful candidate will be encouraged to travel throughout the Caribbean in search of such approaches and research. As part of this fellowship a trip to Scotland is essential, offering an opportunity to use the experience with the Scottish based partners as a form of mentorship. In collaboration with the partners, a realistic budget will be proposed, maximising the opportunities.

Within the Tilting Axis meetings, complexities of mobility, decolonisation, institutionalism, curatorial knowledge, pragmatics, and social realities have been surfacing as keywords of urgency within Caribbean cultural life. The mentorship element in the fellowship allows for a stable basis from which to draw and use spaces, libraries, individual knowledge, and other infrastructure, both in the Caribbean and Scotland) depending on the nature of the needs in the application.

For whom?

Curators, researchers, artists, or cultural producers based in the Caribbean region who want to make new links within the region as well as in Scotland and have a keen interest in developing their curatorial practice.

Goals

• Develop, stimulate, support, and visualise curatorial and artistic realities coming from the Caribbean region
• Facilitate face-to-face communication in Scotland as well as in the Caribbean region
• Offer a free and open access to knowledge
• Provide a stable platform for professional experiences
• Produce critical knowledge on educational tools as well as visual culture
• Focus on emerging practices
• Cross existing language barriers
• Utilise the existing Tilting Axis network
• Offer practical support and a trip to Scotland

Geography

The Caribbean is an active region. The definition of what is the Caribbean is not uniformed; Wikipedia provides a useful list that includes the islands and the continental countries.

Drawing on the specifics of the region through processes of decolonisation, language barriers, race, mobility, and digitalisation, your proposal might approach actively how people live and work and especially how contemporary art takes a responsibility to reflect and act on it. What are fears as well as potentials in these current times? Within such a complex geography, what are the challenges?

Mentorship and support

The fellowship offers a strong supportive framework and takes the model of a mentorship programme. Depending on the candidate’s interests and skills, several personal mentors are available for support throughout the programme. There is open access to infrastructure, curatorial and artistic ideas, exhibition spaces, archives, and libraries as well as personal stories and experiences within these institutions and individuals. Also online, Skype, and email support will be available from the mentors throughout the fellowship. A contribution to the public blogs of British Council and CCA Glasgow will be required along with a final report on the Fellowship and a presentation at Tilting Axis in April 2017 at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands.

Application

Applicants for the fellowship are invited to develop an independent proposal outlining a clear interest in the issues highlighted. The proposal should include a realistic travel itinerary, carefully selected within budget restrictions, and content driven. The application can be based on already existing research or offer new projects. No outcome is expected from the outset, but a proposal that shows organisation of collateral events that allow for public access to the issues is appreciated.

Departing from a curatorial ambition, we expect to see strong proposals of maximum 1000 words. Please include a budget proposal (maximum of £5000), a CV and two references. The application should be submitted via e-mail to: jennifer@cca-glasgow.com.

Submission deadline: Monday 11 July 2016.

Emerging art practitioners are particularly encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will be living and working in the Caribbean region.

Remy Jungerman, Spirit Levels, CCA Glasgow 2014, Photography by Alan Dimmick.

Summary

Aimed at curators, researchers, artists, or cultural producers focused on, or with a clear interest in, curatorial practice from the Caribbean region.

Fellowship period: mid 2016 – mid 2017, to be negotiated depending on proposal and personal/professional situations.

The Fellow will be assigned a mentor from the core partners depending on their needs and wishes. Throughout the year these mentors are accessible online or on location.

A total project budget of £5000 will be allotted for the duration of fellowship. The award shall be used exclusively to cover only the costs of travel, per diems, and other fees and living costs identified in the final budget approved by the selection committee.

The Fellow will be selected on the basis of a project proposal and a succinct motivation elaborating the candidate’s interest in developing a Caribbean curatorial practice. The deadline for submission will be Monday 11 July 2016.

The proposals will be judged by an international jury consisting of curators, academics, and museum professionals, after which shortlisted candidates will be invited for an interview via Skype.

The Curatorial Fellow will be appointed at the end of July 2016. Jurors will be:

Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden, Mother Tongue, UK
Holly Bynoe, ARC Magazine, The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas and Tilting Axis co-founder
Mario Caro, board member of Res Artis, Tilting Axis partner
Annalee Davis, British Council Caribbean, Fresh Milk Barbados, Tilting Axis co-founder
Francis McKee, CCA Glasgow, UK
Max Slaven, David Dale Gallery, UK
Laura Simpson, Hospitalfield, Arbroath, UK

Possible partners within the network include:

Alice Yard, Trinidad + Tobago
ARC Magazine
Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc., Barbados
Ateliers ‘89, Aruba
Bermuda National Gallery
Beta-Local, Puerto Rico
British Council Caribbean
espace d’art contemporain 14°N 61°W, Martinique
Ghetto Biennale, Haiti
Johanna Auguaic, Director, BIAC, Martinique
Instituto Buena Bista, Curacao
L’Artocarpe, Guadeloupe
National Art Gallery of The Bahamas
National Gallery of Jamaica
National Gallery of the Cayman Islands
NLS, Jamaica
Tembe Art Studio, Suriname

In partnership with CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery and Studios, Hospitalfield, Mother Tongue and Tilting Axis. Supported by British Council Scotland.

Mother Tongue selected as winners in the apexart Franchise Program 2015-16

April 17, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

apexart has announced the four winning proposals for its Franchise Program 2015-16, which accepts ideas for group exhibitions to be presented anywhere in the world. Among this year’s winners is Mother Tongue, the curatorial duo of Tiffany Boyle & Jessica Carden, who undertook a residency at Fresh Milk in January-February 2015. The four winning proposals receive a budget and administrative support to bring their projects to life in locations outside of New York City.

Mother Tongue’s Submitted Proposal:

In July 1996, an archaeological team were called to a construction site at Pierhead docks, in Bridgetown, Barbados. Clearing the ground for the planned expansion of a shopping mall, a mass grave of human remains were uncovered. Tests concluded that the site was a burial ground for African slaves; those who had either died in the final stages of the Middle Passage, too close to shore to be thrown overboard, or those brought to Barbados for ‘seasoning’ – to be broken into the life of the plantocracy, before being moved onto other Caribbean islands. Following a deliberately short period of time for the archaeological dig, the site was covered in concrete, to be used as a car park, with no commemorations or signage to mark the importance of the area.

The hurry to cover over and conceal the site speaks of the continued dominance of the ruling classes’ economic interests over the island’s black population. As locals gathered around the archaeological dig, demands were made for libations of rum to be poured to the ghosts of the deceased and to ‘duppies,’ bad and malicious spirits. That rum was to be poured is laced with irony; since the slaves were brought across in the ships to farm the sugar from which such rum is distilled, but also because the car park is bordered by two empty customs warehouses, where rum would have previously been stored before global export.

This is not the only site of significance for the island’s slave history to be unidentified. This amnesia or selective memory is in many ways mirrored by the local art history and community; unmarked by the absence of a national art gallery and state support. Past activity, developments and successes are lost between generations, with most major Caribbean surveys taking place in the West and links between each generation broken as artists move abroad for opportunities not available on home territory. There are currently only four small and ill-equipped exhibition spaces on the island: two housed within the art college and university, the remainder commercial spaces.

The Pierhead site and old customs warehouses are today disused. This proposal is made for an exhibition and performance, to be held on the Pierhead site in 2016, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Barbados’ independence and host nation for the second time to the Caribbean-wide annual festival, Carifesta. ‘Rum Retort’ will purposefully run parallel to these official, state-sponsored events. A large group exhibition will be housed inside one of the customs warehouses, concerned with making visible the history of Pierhead within its locality, with works from artists including Nick Whittle; Annalee Davis; Ewan Atkinson; Sheena Rose and Holly Bynoe. A patterned installation print will be commissioned from artist Mark King to be produced directly onto the concrete car park, temporarily acknowledging what lies below. For the opening and closing of the exhibition, a dance performance will be commissioned from dancer and choreographer Yanique Hume, to take place outside the warehouse, on the concrete car park surface.

Read more about the other selected projects here.

Please note: Proposals are ideas for exhibitions. No details, including artist participation, have been confirmed. The apexart Franchise Program is supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

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Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden.

About Mother Tongue:

Mother Tongue is a research-led curatorial project formed by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden, in response to individual periods of investigation in northern Scandinavia and West Africa. Our practice in exhibition-making intersects with research interests – including, but not limited to – (post)colonialism, language, heritage, ethnicity, whiteness, indigenousness, migration, movement, sexuality, and technology.

Since 2009, we have produced exhibitions, film programmes, discursive events, essays and publications in partnership with organisations such as the CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow; Stills: Scotland’s Centre for Photography; Transmission Gallery; Africa-in-Motion Film Festival; Malmö Konsthall; and Konsthall C Stockholm, and undertaken residencies with HIAP in Helsinki, the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, and CreativeLab at CCA Glasgow. Mother Tongue participated on the 2011/12 CuratorLab programme at Konstfack, and we are currently both undertaking individual PhD’s – Tiffany at Birkbeck and Jessica at TrAIN: Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation, University of the Arts London. In 2015, Mother Tongue will continue to collaborate with Variant magazine, Framework Scotland and the Creative Futures Institute at UWS on the ongoing discussion series, ‘Curating Europes’ Futures.’

Mother Tongue’s Residency – Final Blog Post

March 23, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Mother Tongue, the curatorial duo of Jessica Carden and Tiffany Boyle, share their final blog post about their Fresh Milk residency, which concluded at the end of February 2015. They recount the last set of meetings they were able to conduct in their very full and productive schedule, including speaking with more artists & academics, visiting collections, and finally attending the Tilting Axis conference. Read the full post below:

Walking Tour with Dr Anthony Richards

The final two weeks of our residency with Fresh Milk were incredibly full and productive, and left us with little time to put down in words how things had been progressing for us. So, belatedly – and from our colder home climates – here is our final blog, as we begin to reflect more widely on our time and research in Barbados.

Work by Versia Harris installed at Alice Yard, Trinidad

We began our fourth week at the Fresh Milk studio where the emerging Barbadian artist Versia Harris talked us through her latest videoworks. Versia has had a really busy couple of years with residencies and exhibitions across Europe, Russia, the USA and the Caribbean, so we were fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss her work in-person. In the afternoon, we led a curating workshop with the Fresh Milk Books group. Within this session, the group worked together to select an exhibition and then present to us an exhibition redux, making revisions, reimaginings and remodellings of the original exhibition’s concept and execution. The workshop proved to be a successful method of furthering the FMB groups’ understanding and expectations around curatorial practice, and how it yields a huge affect on the way their own work is framed and represented.

Caribbean Cultural Thought reader: edited by Aaron & Yanique

Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination UWI

Mervyn Awon’s private Collection

Mid-week we met with Dr. Aaron Kamugisha, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies where we discussed his work on coloniality, cultural citizenship and freedom in the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean, as well as his role of editor for the ‘Caribbean Political Thought: The Colonial State to Caribbean Internationalisms’ (2013) which has been an influential reference point for our own research in Barbados. Also situated on the Cave Hill campus at UWI is the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination which offers BA and postgraduate degree programmes. At the EBCCI we met with the director, Gladstone Yearwood, who gave us a tour of the building and described some of the educational approaches the centre is taking in relation to arts education. Later in the day, we visited with Therese Hadchity the private collection of architect Mervyn Awon, whose collection has been amassed over a period of 40 years and predominantly consists of Caribbean modern and contemporary art.

Work by Nick Whittle

Hosted within the capital’s Grande Salle, we attended the film screening of documentary ‘Chinee Girl’ by Natalie Wei which formed the later part of the Fish and Dragon Festival opening reception on the 19th. ‘Chinee Girl’ interweaves testimonials from twelve Chinese-Trinidadian women from all different walks of life to explore the various stereotypes and issues of identity they face daily in Trinidadian society. The end of the week was marked by our visit to the home of the artist Nick Whittle; an artist who has been making work in Barbados since the 70’s. Nick talked us through his recent works including his ongoing collaboration with his daughter and fellow artist Alberta Whittle, before allowing us to search through his print archive consisting of some of the older works. Nick was really instrumental in helping us to map the arts scene during the 80’s and 90’s, through his involvement in many of the local and regional exhibitions. Our visit ended with a very special reading from Nick; his poem ‘This Is Not My Land,’ is still echoing in our thoughts.

Ras Ishi Butcher

Our fifth and final week began with a visit to the National Cultural Foundation where we met with Andrea Wells, Chief Cultural Officer, and Rodney Ifill, Visual Arts Officer, focusing on their remits across the arts sector. We then travelled northeast across the island to make a studio visit with the prominent artist Ras Ishi Butcher. Previously working closely with the artist Ras Akyem, Ishi and Akyem left Barbados in the 90’s to study in Cuba. Ishi showed us new works, particularly focused on the female body and gender in the context of the Caribbean. We then viewed some of his older works whilst discussing his views on sustaining a practice on the island. That evening, we met with Dr. Anthony Richards, a biotechnologist based in Barbados who gave us a walking tour of the city centre. We discussed the spiritual meanings of the island’s flora and fauna, as well as being taken to a number of sites which are known to be important for the history of slavery and the sugar industry on the including the dockyard and city port.

Walking Tour with Dr Anthony Richards

On Tuesday we met with the dancer, choreographer and academic Dr. Yanique Hume. Co-editor alongside Aaron Kamugisha of the ‘Caribbean Political Thought’ volume, Yanique is also based within the Cultural Studies department of the University of the West Indies. Our conversation began with discussing the evolution of Yanique’s own practice in dance and choreography, before discussing her research into the arts in Barbados in the 70’s (primarily around Elombe Mottley’s ‘Yoruba Yard’ and Ras Akyem and Ras Ishi’s public painting projects), before discussing examples of exhibition-making focused around colonialism and race.

On Wednesday morning, we were very lucky to be granted access to the Barbados Gallery Association’s collection which is currently housed in the national museum’s storage facility in Holetown, located on the west coast of the island. We were accompanied by a number of the association’s committee members who talked us through their acquisitions process and future plans for the collection. We picked out works from the store to view, from artists including Stanley Greaves, Arthur Atkinson and Norma Talma; works which we had only previously seen in catalogues and books. On Thursday evening after visits to the British High Commission and the Ministry of Culture, we returned to Mojo’s bar on the south coast where we had met with the local artists and Fresh Milk team four weeks previously for welcoming drinks. This time, we were celebrating our four weeks and saying our farewells, whilst also welcoming a number of participants who had arrived early for the Tilting Axis international symposium which would be taking place at Fresh Milk later in the week. Directors Max Slaven and Ellie Royle arrived from David Dale Gallery, Scotland, alongside CCA Glasgow curator Remco de Blaaij.

Art Foundry Tour with Jocelyn Gardner

Our final day before our residency came to an end was spent with the artist and curator Joscelyn Gardener. Joscelyn met with us in the Fresh Milk studio and described her experiences of being both an artist and curator in Barbados, her framing of her heritage as ‘white-creole’ and the challenges she faced whilst running the Art Foundry; a gallery space which has now closed but was an important landmark within the arts scene for bringing international work and challenging subject-matter to the island. An established artist now living in Canada, Joscelyn spoke about the difficulties facing all artists in Barbados and her role on various committees attempting to secure a national gallery throughout the 90’s.

Tilting Axis

The following two days were dedicated to the international symposium ‘Tilting Axis: Within and Beyond the Caribbean – Shifting Models of Sustainability and Connectivity’ which was held at Fresh Milk. A partnership between ARC Magazine, Res Artis, Perez Art Museum Miami and Fresh Milk, the aim of the meeting was to promote conversations and engagement between artists and professionals within artist-led initiatives across the wider Caribbean region, build and redefine historical relationships with those in the North, and establish open dialogues and networks emerging in the Global south. Alongside David Dale Gallery and CCA Glasgow, we were present and supported by the British Council Scotland, representing artistic activity across Scotland. The conference witnessed 34 participants from all across the Caribbean come together in order to exchange experiences and form strategies for future support and collaborations. It was a rich experience and one that will undoubtedly have lasting effects. We will be sharing a report on the conference, alongside all participants in the coming month. We will also be reporting back on the outcomes of our residency with Fresh Milk, as well as information on the return project to take place in Scotland – more coming soon!