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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Jazz Moreton and Alan Wan Wijgerden reflect on their Nest residency
Over the course of this residency, we developed a shared artistic voice that built on our individual experiences of disability. We had a great time examining our shared practice throughout this residency. Although Alan has more professional experience (an age thing, not a professionalism thing!), Jazz has a mind full of fresh ideas and solutions to almost any creative issue.
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Mason Le Long Reflects on his Hatching Residency with Talking Birds
To be honest, I thought it sounded too good to be true. Talking Birds promising to pay artists to come and work in their studios for ten days, and not even asking for any finished material at the end of it? I thought there must be more to it than meets the eye.
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Anne Forgan reflects on her Hatching Residency
A place of permission.
I shouldn’t need it, but still I do.
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Matt Rheeston reflects on his Hatching Residency
For my Nest Residency I spent time exploring my creativity in a therapeutic way, through drawing, music, song writing and production.
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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.
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Selina Masih reflects on her Nestival Residency
I had a great time at The Nest, A two-week art residency in the studio ‘Helloland’. It was painted in a cheerful yellow which made me instantly smile. Two whole weeks to fully immerse myself in this project, I was super excited! For over 2 years I’ve been waiting to find time to explore ‘paint carving’ an art-form I came across during lockdown, created by the Australian artist Hannah Jenson.
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Michael Snodgrass reflects on his Hatching Residency
My hatching residency raised a few areas to reflect on as a visual artist; a place and a studio space to go each day and create, a time to explore techniques, a chance to talk to other people about my work (and theirs), the opportunity to discuss work as it happens, respond to people’s thoughts and receive mentoring around social media and sharing work publicly.
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Cody Maycock reflects on his Nestival Residency
I recently finished two weeks in my temporary studio space and it was exactly what my creatively blocked brain needed.
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Indira Lakshmi reflects on her Nestival Residency
It’s always a pleasure to be at the Nest!
I spent the last two weeks on June in the Helloland studio. I had been working on building midi instruments with Arduino and Pure Data for some time, having made a rudimentary teddy-bear with potentiometers that control an FM Synth I’d programmed with Pure Data.
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Rosalind Harvey reflects on her Nest Residency
Recently I have been thinking a lot about space. The literal, physical space in which to do one’s work (Virginia Woolf’s ‘Room of One’s Own’), but also the mental space you need to carve out in which to write, to think, to create. I normally work from home and am very used to doing so (I’ve been a self-employed writer-translator for almost 15 years now), but after spending more time at home than even I am comfortable with during lockdown, my relationship to working from home has shifted.
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Words from the Birds 