Sent to Coventry: Creative Accounting, Talking Birds & mycelium

| vornster

Guest blog from the Creative Accounting research team, reflecting on their recent collaboration with Talking Birds

On 18 May 2023, an unusual event took place at the recently restored Draper’s Hall, a historic building on Bayley Lane in the Cathedral Quarter of Coventry, built in 1832. Eleven professional accountants gathered for a business-style dinner with canapes, drinks and a three-course meal. However, the aim of the event was not to engage in normal accounting business and networking, in fact quite the opposite.

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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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Scrutinising the fall

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Notes taken at the Meeting of the Finance and Corporate Services Scrutiny Board of Coventry City Council – March 29th 2023 for circulation to F13 and other artists in the city. Please note that these are not the official minutes – those will become available via the City Council’s website in due course.

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History is made by those who write the stories

| vornster

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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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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