Artists Residency

discovering a radical acceptance

| Charlie

Cait Buckley reflects on her Hatching Residency

Before I began my nest residency I had been in the biggest creative rut I had encountered since I began making art. I had all of these ideas, yet didn’t have the drive to explore them. Something about keeping them in my mind and not putting them out into the world felt like the safest bet for me. The space and time given to me through my nest residency allowed me to really dive into what was blocking my creativity, and why I felt it was better to keep my ideas in my thoughts rather than out in the world.

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More Kate Bush, less Britney Spears

| Charlie

Michelle Bailey reflects on her Hatching Residency

I always tell people (and myself) that if I had more time I would be able to be more productive and creative. But the reality is that I’m the biggest detriment to my creativity. I could find the time, I could be more focused, I could be more disciplined. So when I finally got the time and space to work on a new idea, I was excited but also anxious about the experience. What if I can’t do it? What if my work is rubbish? What if I fail at it?

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Show, Don’t tell

| Charlie

Jake Barrowcliffe reflects on his Hatching residency

As part of my residency at The Nest, I was required to write a blog post. For some reason, I decided that what I would do instead was write about my experiences as they happened. This has taken the form of a journal of sorts. Now, I will warn you immediately, I have never kept a diary before. I often find my day to day life so utterly boring that the idea of reliving the moment-by-moment banality while writing it down and then by reading it back years later is like a Kafka-esque nightmare to me. However, this details something unusual and out of the ordinary. I do hope, dear reader, that you find some use in what follows or, at least, some entertainment.

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Changing landscapes

| Charlie

Tom Godwin reflects on his Hatching Nest Residency

My hatching residency revolved around an old photograph I found amongst some of my grandad’s possessions of Coventry City centre taken around the ’60s. I was immediately fascinated with the differences to the present day and the idea of changing landscapes and our role in shaping these changes as well as my own personal connection to the landscapes around me. My initial plan was to go into this residency with just this picture and an open mind to take this project in any direction it took me.

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Now for that funding bid….

| Charlie

Pippa Church reflects on her Hatching Nest Residency

What a gift, this nest residency! 5, uninterrupted, (well, slightly interrupted by child care and snow) days of focus, pondering, wondering, dreaming, scheming and creating!

My aim going into this residency was to get closer to making a burning phoenix puppet, am I any closer to raising it….maybe just a funding application away!

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Time (and time again)

| Charlie

Sarah Owen reflects on their second residency at the Nest

One of the last things I said before I finished my second residency at the Nest back in July 2022 was a tongue-in-cheek promise that it wouldn’t take me three months to write my blog about my experience, after I did exactly that last time. In my defence, I didn’t lie. However, taking eight months to write it instead was not exactly my intention. But! Better late than never, and I think I can (and I will) argue that it’s sort of appropriate for a person who spent their Nest residency working on a stage musical about time to also be consistently dogged by time as a concept. 

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Don’t Touch My Hair

| Charlie

Rosa Francesca reflects on her Coventry Biennial Nest Residency

In 2021 I completed a Nest Residency on the subject of Black hair and the Natural Hair movement, particularly looking at how Black women’s relationship with their hair is often intruded upon, either physically by white people touching it without consent, or through unsolicited advice and comments  on its styling. My project was a cybernetic wig, using a variety of sensors to create an interactive wig that both entices and reprimands users to interact with the wig.

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a freedom i’d not felt before

| vornster

Tom Simkins reflects on his recent Hatching Residency

I finally managed to apply for my Hatching residency at Talking Birds.

I wanted to try out more movement and performance related work, and also explore my synesthesia. After a few initial ideas of how I might explore this, and some helpful and supportive conversations with the Birds I set out to see how I could explore or express my relationship with my senses in synesthesia through movement.

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The Drugs Don’t Work, But the coffee does

| Charlie

Filmmaker Adrian Dowling reflects on his Nestival Residency

It took me more than two months to apply to do the residency. I kept putting it off because I find those kind of things very difficult, but after attending one of the F13 meetings I felt quite comfortable in the space. Duncan Whitley [a former Talking Birds Resident] was pushing me, saying “Why don’t you do it? I think it would be good for you.” So I recorded a voice application with the help of my daughter, Kady, who’s doing all the technical stuff while I’m reading off some paper because I find it quite difficult to write things down.

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