Guest blog by Chris Rolls of 64 Million Artists reflecting on the Community Changemaker training he led for a cohort of our Citizens’ Assembly participants
Creative dialogue leads to good things. And Creative Citizen Changemakers, the result of conversations between Coventry-based Talking Birds and 64 Million Artists, is a fine testament to this.
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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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Bally Sembi reflects on her Hatching Residency
This is the first time I have ever taken on an artist residency and I didn’t know what to expect. I was excited and nervous all the same.
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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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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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Losing the City of Culture legacy programme feels like a bereavement, but what the sector is mourning is not the Trust, but the glittering story of a city lifted up and made forever better by arts, culture and creativity. Not because this story didn’t happen, but because it is currently overshadowed and in danger of being drowned out by the story of the failure of the City of Culture Trust.
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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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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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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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Erinn Dhesi reflects on her Nestival Residency with Talking Birds
Writing doesn’t suck as much when you’re not writing from a hovel. Not that where I live is a physical hovel. Just a creative one.
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Navkiran Kaur Mann reflects on her Nestival Residency
I started my Nestival Residency with a sense of apprehension. Do I call myself an artist? As a person I am many things. I asked myself, does this label fit me? Do I belong in the arts? As a Brown woman I rarely see people who look like me in the arts.
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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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Words from the Birds 