Nicola Richardson and Marianne Taviner reflect on their Hatching Residency

We are Nicola and Maz, the Directors of Vortex Creates. Vortex is a Coventry based organisation who for nearly 15 years have specialised in igniting the imagination of audiences through transforming spaces and creating showstopping costumes.

Vortex Directors Nicola Richardson & Marianne Taviner

With an established roster of clients, we are accustomed to transforming other people’s visions into a creative reality. Although everything we make has a Vortex twist, rarely do we have the opportunity to invest time and thought into making our own concepts come to fruition. Both of us trained as Fine Artists and have exhibited our work around the world, but owning and operating an organisation doesn’t leave much time for conceiving personal projects. When we saw the Nest residency and realised how beneficial it could be for us, we leapt at the opportunity to apply.

One of the most appealing aspects of the residency was the offer of space. We have a colourfully chaotic unit where we create our client work, so the blank canvas at Talking Birds HQ provided a welcome retreat to take a step back from the physical world of Vortex in order to have the mental space to provoke the artistic conversations. Our aim for this residency was to actually give some substance to an idea we have been discussing for the last few years. Joy is a word we use often at Vortex – it shines through in how we present ourselves as an organisation and radiates through the work we create – so a project focused on instilling collective joy within an audience seemed like a logical project to create. We arrived at the residency with the intention to explore and shape ‘JOY’: an immersive experience that promotes physical and mental well-being. A project centred around community and celebration in a world denied those things during the pandemic.

Despite the blank room being initially so enticing, we quickly had the realisation that in order to spark joy we needed to immerse ourselves in it. So in classic Vortex fashion we transformed the space.

Although it had a touch of colourful chaos, it was a welcome world away from our unit. The pieces we brought to Talking Birds HQ were carefully selected as they invoked joy – either because we loved making them or because we had witnessed the joy they had brought to audiences. With the perfect Vortex work environment created, our ‘JOY’ journey began. 

We rarely have the time to speak about passion projects as our days are consumed by client work, so we began with outlining what we thought the event could look like. As simple as it sounds, to lay it out on a whiteboard instead of it just whirling around our heads made for a productive and enlightening start and forged a much clearer path to go forward. We dissected the portfolio of work Vortex has created over the years pulling out aspects of each project that embodied what we felt was ‘Vortex joy’. This led us onto the next stage of our residency. We know what Vortex joy is, but what does joy mean to everyone else? A deep dive into the etymology of the word joy ensued followed up with us losing ourselves in countless academic articles about the psychology and science behind joy. What is joy? How is it evoked? How does it differ in people? Is it an emotion or a choice? To provide us with some clarity on all these questions and to bring it back to the world of Vortex, we invited some colleagues and confidants to discuss what joy meant to them.

Marianne and Nicola with Julia Carruthers (Warwick Arts Centre’s Programme Director)

From drag queens to theatre venue leaders, the responses were so varied and vivid that it quickly became clear that joy is unique in how it manifests in each individual. Quite often the conversations moved to ‘Vortex joy’ and how we had brought joy specifically to each person – either through our work or by working with them. For some it meant the feeling they had after seeing us dress their venue, for others it was the feeling they had through the collaboration we’d had and how it enhanced their creative concepts.

We left these conversations not only with a better grasp of what joy meant to others but also with a better understanding of how Vortex is perceived as an organisation, especially what is special about Vortex and our offer that attracts clients to maintain their relationships with us. We shifted our perspective from these people being clients and collaborators to instead being Vortex audience members, and began building a narrative around who a Vortex audience member is and why they would want to attend our shows.

We thought the Nest residency would provide us with the chance to revisit an idea and begin laying the foundations for creating an actual event. Instead it gave us the opportunity to revisit Vortex as an organisation – what makes us so unique? What is it specifically that we do well that would get audience members through the door? How does this translate into a successful funding application? We ended the residency extremely grateful to Talking Birds, feeling rejuvenated and galvanised with a completely fresh perspective on our next steps in making that Vortex passion project a colourful chaotic reality.