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 There in Oklahoma, is the unlikely home of a collection of Rhys’ correspondence, drafts, unpublished writings, a few personal effects and a touching recording of the author singing songs from her childhood in Dominican Patois.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.

Jordan Clarke’s Residency – Week 4 Blog Post

April 20, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Barbadian-Canadian painter Jordan Clarke shares her fourth blog post about her Fresh Milk residency. In her final week, Jordan confronts some of the underlying reasons for her disconnect with the Barbadian side of her identity, and sees her experience in the island as a starting point to build on as she investigates this part of her culture and herself. Read more below:

“As is common to most transnational communities, the extended family – as network and site of memory – is the critical conduit between the two locations.” (Stuart Hall, ‘Thinking the Diaspora: Home – Thoughts from Abroad’, Caribbean Political Thought)

It is typically through family that Caribbean migrants are able to maintain a sense of connection to their Caribbean culture. What happens, however, when there isn’t a sense of cultural sharing through family? How does this affect one’s sense of cultural identity?

In my fourth week at Fresh Milk, I confronted the fact that my father has never been solidly present to share his cultural identity and family with me. I drew a self-portrait in response, with the intention of representing a conversation I would have with my father. A more confident me stares out, confronting.

I realize that the work I have created here during my residency represents a starting point for further investigation of the theme of self-perception, as well as self-discovery. It will act as a guide for future work once I’m home.

In thinking about the four weeks I’ve been here, I couldn’t be more grateful for this rewarding experience. Having such a wonderful studio to work in, without the usual daily distractions, has been refreshing and inspirational. Fresh Milk’s extensive library, full of contemporary Caribbean literature and art publications, has been an invaluable tool for informing my work here. I can’t thank both Annalee Davis and Katherine Kennedy enough for all their help and support. Annalee is full of knowledge and has been able to point me in directions I showed interest in, while leaving me space to navigate my art practice. I would also like to thank Aaron Kamugisha for his help and good company.

It has been so stimulating to connect with all the artists who have visited Fresh Milk during my residency. I see my time here as a starting point, a spark that will encourage further exploration and dialogue in my art practice.

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This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Fundraising for Versia Harris’ Residency at Casa Tomada

April 14, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Barbadian artist Versia Harris will be going to Sao Paulo, Brasil for a two-month residency with Casa Tomada beginning June 1, 2015.

To raise funds to help cover the living costs of this collaborative programme organized between Fresh Milk and Casa Tomada, Versia will be selling reproductions of stills from her original animations leading up to the residency.

To view available pieces for sale, click here.

Please email Versia at versia.abeda@gmail.com for payment methods and shipping fees.

Jordan Clarke’s Residency – Week 3 Blog Post

April 13, 2015May 21, 20152 Comments

Barbadian-Canadian painter Jordan Clarke shares her third blog post about her Fresh Milk residency, continuing to use self-portraiture and exploration of her surroundings for self-discovery and both personal and artistic growth, reckoning with the multiple facets and cultures that comprise her identity. Read more below:

While at Fresh Milk, I have been working through self-portraiture, landscapes, photography and journaling as a means to document my first visit to Barbados. Born in Canada, I am the daughter of a Canadian mother with Scottish and English roots and a Barbadian father who has now spent 75% of his life in Canada. As a result, I possess multiple identities. I see myself as mixed-race, Black and Canadian.

In Barbados, where I have no family members, I feel disconnected and exposed. I am an outsider in my father’s homeland where I had hoped to feel a sense of homecoming and belonging. Not surprisingly, the work I have been producing here is introspective, exploring the theme of self-perception. My double self-portrait in graphite really expresses the sense of vulnerability and sadness I felt soon after my arrival in Barbados.

I have also been looking outwards, exploring landscapes in my work, specifically sky and cloudscapes. I’m attracted to clouds because they are always in movement and constantly changing, creating new formations that never repeat. I also find them to be majestic and beautiful. For me, clouds represent a universal space rather than a specific place, a space that is similar in both Toronto and Barbados.

At the moment, I see landscapes and portraits as two different practices. I had originally intended to insert myself into the landscape to create a connection with the land and Barbados. Interestingly enough, this joining of my body and a still unfamiliar landscape isn’t happening.

This residency is a special opportunity for self-discovery and evolution. I am realizing that change is not always comfortable, but is an essential part of my growth as a woman and as an artist. What is most painful is the feeling that I am missing a large part of my cultural roots and identity.

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This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Jordan Clarke’s Residency – Week 2 Blog Post

April 7, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Barbadian-Canadian painter Jordan Clarke shares her second blog post about her Fresh Milk residency. She addresses the direction her work is taking, focusing on self-portraiture and developing the background of her pieces to suggest a sense of space, and has continued to explore the island alongside fellow resident artists Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe of Cooking Sections. Read more below:

Two weeks into the residency and it feels like I just arrived.

I’ve been spending the majority of my time in the studio creating, reflecting and taking everything in. I’m sensing this as a time for gathering images, ideas and information that will find expression in my future creations.

It seems that I have gravitated towards self-portraiture as a way to access how I am feeling and thinking about myself in relation to this new place, Barbados. In addition to working from images, I have taken on the challenge of drawing myself from life each day. To assist me, Annalee set up a large mirror in the studio space. What I’ve found interesting is that none of the portraits drawn from life look completely like me.

Over the past week, I have been thinking about identity and how it is shaped. I realize now that my sense of identity is not linked directly to Barbados, despite my father’s Bajan roots. This is the perfect opportunity for me to think about how I would like to identify, how I see myself, as well as how my life experiences have shaped me.

Mid week I met Barbadian artist Simone Padmore who addresses themes of identity in her work. Some of her illustrations can be found in ARC magazine issue #5.

Towards the end of the week I began to think about the landscape, and how I could paint myself into one. The figure and landscape have always been separate for me. In my work the background suggests a sense of space rather than a specific place or location. I’m not sure where this will go, but it is something I am working on.

It was Easter weekend, and on Good Friday Annalee made a delicious gluten free quiche for our lunch. I am definitely being spoiled here!

An exciting event for me was finding out that early Saturday morning a horse was born on the family farm.

I ended the week traveling part of the West Coast with Alon and Daniel of Cooking Sections, who are also doing a residency here at Fresh Milk. We started at a lively market in Bridgetown. It was a completely different experience from the quiet and serene studio in St. George. I enjoyed the liveliness and dancehall music on the mini buses. We also took some time to enjoy ourselves on the beach. The West Coast is ideal for swimming, in contrast to the rugged picturesque East Coast. Our day ended with food and music at the Oistins Fish Fry on the South Coast.

Looking forward to the week ahead.

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This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.