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The Fresh Milk Team wishes you and yours all the very best for the season as we look back on the year 2015.
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Season's Greetings
from the FRESH MILK Team!

 

FRESH MILK exists because of the tremendous support we receive from artists, our volunteers and the wider community. This has been a great year, and we are pleased to share our newsletter highlighting activities we undertook in 2015.

We wish everyone a wonderful season and all the best for the upcoming year. We look forward to continuing to engage with you then! Fresh Milk wants to kick off 2016 by learning more about what young artists and filmmakers in Barbados are doing. Graduates of the Barbados Community College (BCC), Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (EBCCI) and all creatives: share your practice with us by sending in a CV, 200 word bio, 500 word artist statement and 5-10 images and accompanying  image list or links to your video files. Send all information in one email to freshmilkbarbados@gmail.com by January 29, 2016. 

In the meantime, we invite you to take a look at...
Residencies
Work in progress by Simone Asia
2015 has been Fresh Milk's biggest year for residencies yet, and we were pleased to start the year by welcoming Tiffany Boyle & Jessica Carden of the curatorial project Mother Tongue. This exploratory research and writing residency was their first visit to Barbados and the wider Caribbean. They conducted studio visits, archival research, meetings, interviews, etc. as initial groundwork as a way of getting to terms with a locale very different to their home territory of Scotland. Mother Tongue will return to Barbados next year to curate the upcoming exhibition Rum Retort.
In March we hosted Barbadian-Canadian visual artist Jordan Clarke, who used her residency at Fresh Milk to discover and explore her Caribbean identity and ancestry. She took the time and space to focus on her practice, connect with the Bajan community and exchange ideas with local Barbadian artists, especially those dealing with identity politics in their work. Jordan confronted some of the underlying ideas around her disconnect with the Barbadian side of her identity, and saw her experience in the island as a starting point to build on as she investigates this part of her culture and herself. 
Overlapping for 10 days of Jordan's residency, the London-based duo Cooking Sections comprised of Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe visited Fresh Milk. Their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture, geopolitics and food, and their trip to Barbados investigated the sharp decline in the Caribbean food crops and the critical reinvention of the landscape through agricultural innovation, tourism and offshore activities. 

Between April and May, we hosted the second edition of the Fresh Milk 'My Time'  local residency with the kind support of anonymous donors, and we were very pleased to have Simone Asia participate in this. She saw this period as a “playground for opportunities,” taking the chance to experiment with surface, scale and technique while exploring and responding organically to the environment at Fresh Milk.
Towards the end of Simone's residency from April/May, Fresh Milk welcomed our fifth set of residents for 2015, Australian inter‐disciplinary artists of Caribbean extraction Willoh S. Weiland and Halcyon Macleod. They spent a month working on their collaborative project ‘Crawl Me Blood’, a sound installation inspired by the works of Dominican writer Jean Rhys and her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea. As part of their research for the project, they have been conducting a series of interviews with a number of women in Australia and in the Caribbean.
From mid May into June, our next artist-in-residence was Thais Francis, a Trinidad-born, Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary performance artist and writer. Thais used her time on the platform to work on the script for her first feature film. She also conducted a community outreach project with students of Workmans Primary School, where she held a theatre workshop with the students over a number of weeks.
Also in June, we were pleased to be joined by writer Saada Branker and filmmaker Powys Dewhurst. The two spent their time collecting stories from locals about Hurricane Janet, which hit Barbados on September 22, 1955. What they gathered will be part of a multi-media project and short film presenting an exchange of Bajan and Bajan-Canadian memories about the Hurricane experience. Saada hosted a workshop on long form journalism as part of their community outreach during the residency. 
After our summer break, we resumed our residencies with Nadijah Robinson. A Canadian artist of Barbadian heritage, Nadijah reconnected with her extended family to explore her roots and the notion of ‘home’ in Barbados through her artistic practice using mixed media collage. Giving a presentation to the final year students in the BFA programme at BCC also had an impact, causing her to consider her goals as a socially engaged artist.

Our final residency of 2015 was with Danish artists Maj Hasager and Ask Kæreby. Maj, an artist, and Ask, an electronic composer, spent their month undertaking research in Barbados, engaging with the local arts and music community. Maj instigated discussions focusing on notions of praxis and materiality while Ask conducted a series of experimental sound workshops. The public event FRESH MILK XVIII provided a platform for them, as well as featuring the Beyond Publishing Caribbean team speaking about self-publishing in Barbados.
Projects & Partnerships
Participants in the first edition of Tilting Axis. Photo by Sammy Davis
In 2015, we continued our partnership with local company Adopt A Stop to continue our collaborative Fresh Stops project, bringing art into the public space by commissioning six young Barbadian artists to produce original artwork for benches which appeared around the island between October 2014 and October 2015.

The artists involved were Evan Avery, Matthew Clarke, Versia Harris, Mark King, Simone Asia and Ronald Williams. This project was an opportunity to create visibility for the work these emerging creatives are doing, allowing the public to encounter and interact with their pieces in everyday life which generated interest and invited debate and dialogue about their practices.
The inaugural conference Tilting Axis: Within and Beyond the Caribbean - Shifting Models of Sustainability and Connectivity was held at Fresh Milk on February 27-28, 2015. This meeting aimed to promote greater conversations and engagement between artists and professionals working within artist-led initiatives across the wider Caribbean region, build and redefine historical relationships with those in the North, and establish open dialogue with active networks emerging in the Global South.
Organized by Fresh Milk, ARC Inc., Res Artis and Pérez Art Museum Miami, Tilting Axis saw the founders/directors of several of the region’s artist-led initiatives coming together to engage in face to face conversations, along with a number of professionals from outside the region interested in working with Caribbean based initiatives. The mid-point meeting Tilting Axis 1.5 took place at the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil in Sao Paulo on October 8, 2015, and Tilting Axis 2 is scheduled for February 19-21, 2016 at PAMM.
Also visiting Sao Paulo, Brazil this year as part of a collaborative programme organized between Fresh Milk and Casa Tomada was Barbadian artist Versia Harris. Versia took part in a 7 week residency at Casa Tomada, spending the time working alongside Brazilian artist Janaina Wagner, interacting with arts professionals, producing and showcasing her work and exploring the Brazilian art scene.
Caribbean Linked III took place in August of this year at Ateliers '89, Aruba. The Caribbean Linked Artist Residency Program, organized by Fresh Milk, ARC and Ateliers '89, is a crucial space for building awareness across disparate creative communities of the Caribbean  by finding ways to connect young and emerging creatives from all of the linguistic regions with each other.  The participants this year were Natusha Croes, Jodi Minnis, Ronald Cyrille, Simone Asia, Manuel Mathieu, Aiko Maya Roudette, Razia Barsatie, Marvi Johanna Franco Zapata, Leasho Johnson, Alex Kelly, Leo Aguirre, Diego Espinosa and Natalie McGuire. 
October saw the first edition of the international project Transoceanic Visual Exchange (TVE). Working this year between the Caribbean, Africa and Aotearoa, TVE aims to negotiate the in-between space of cultural communities through a survey of recent film and video works by contemporary artists. The three spaces involved for 2015 – Fresh Milk, VAN Lagos and RM â€“ first met as participants of International Artists Initiated, a programme organized and facilitated by David Dale Gallery, Glasgow. 
TVE screenings took place in Barbados, Nigeria and Auckland. The Barbados events, held in collaboration with the Bim Films Festival, EBCCI and BCC with sponsorship by Stansfeld Scott, featured work by the following artists: David Gumbs, Versia Harris, Katherine Kennedy, Michele Pearson Clarke, Romel Jean Pierre, Olivia McGilchrist, Carlo Reyes, Nick Whittle / Alberta Whittle, Darcell Apelu, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Ngahuia Raima, Louisa Afoa, Nkechi Ebubedike, Akwaeke Emezi and Lambert Mousseka.
Internships & Volunteers
Charles Phillips assisting Saada Branker in an interview with Buddy Larrier as part of her and
Powys Dewhurst's residency

In June, recent graduate of the BCC BFA programme Charles Phillips interned with our resident artists, writer Saada Branker and filmmaker Powys Dewhurst, as their assistant director and 2nd camera for their documentary project recording Barbadians’ experiences of Hurricane Janet, which struck the island 60 years ago.

Joining both our Fresh Milk Books team and coming on as an administrative assistant for Fresh Milk's core team, 2013 graduate of the BCC BFA Programme and current UWI student Tristan Alleyne has been a huge help to Fresh Milk this year as our activities and volume of work continues to increase.

Tristan has been assisting us with the upkeep of the Colleen Lewis Reading Room, maintenance of the studio space and collection/organization of information for our projects throughout the year.
Also coming on as an intern for two weeks in June was Guyanese artist and 2015 graduate of the BCC BFA programme, Dominique Hunter. Dominique assisted Director and the Communications & Operations Manager at Fresh Milk in an administrative capacity, particularly in the updating of our website and social media pages, as well as facilitating a smooth transition for then artist in residence, Thais Francis.
Finally, we were very fortunate to have Rayanne Bushell visit us from Scotland to volunteer with us in October. Rayanne, a British artist of Barbadian and Jamaican heritage who we first connected with in Glasgow while participating in the International Artist Initiated project in 2014, worked with Fresh Milk to sort and archive our existing images, documentation, files and databases from the last four years. She was also able to reflect on the experience of being in Barbados for the first time in fourteen years, visiting family and considering her personal practice while reckoning with the history of the space. 
Open Call: International Residencies 2016

Fresh Milk is seeking proposals from artists working outside of Barbados to apply for our international residency programme in April and May 2016. Available dates for the residencies to take place are between April 11 – May 6 and May 9 â€“ June 3.
Find out more here!

The deadline for applications is January 25, 2016.


You can find out about even more of our programming by checking our website www.freshmilkbarbados.com regularly.

Thank you again for your support, and we look forward to continuing our creative journey together in 2016!
 
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