Contemporary Community Textile Artist Derbyshire UK
Collaboration Kindness Carbon Sensitivity
The Coventry Banner
Turner Prize 2021 Legacy
More Than 280 Community Banners Brought Together At The Herbert
Period
2021–2022
My Role
Project Instigator and Community Engagement Lead
Project Type
Collaborative Project
Location
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry
Project Overview
The Coventry Banner began while I was working on community engagement for Turner Prize 2021 at the Herbert. Array Collective’s installation was full of banners used as part of protest, solidarity and public voice, and I could see a way of carrying some of that energy beyond the exhibition. The idea was simple: invite people across Coventry and the wider region to make a banner about something they genuinely cared about, then give those individual voices a major public space inside the museum.
I took the proposal directly to Array Collective and explained how I wanted the project to work. They approved the idea, I kept them updated as it developed and they later made a banner of their own for the final installation. That mattered because the project grew from a relationship with their practice rather than borrowing the look of the Turner Prize installation and using it without them.
Taking The Project Across Coventry
There was no point expecting everybody to come to the Herbert, so between January and April 2022 I took the project to schools, community groups, neighbourhood organisations and individuals, including people who were still shielding. I ran workshops where people already met and developed an accessible making guide for anyone who wanted or needed to work independently. I also asked Artichoke, the team behind PROCESSIONS, whether unused suffrage sashes from the 2018 project could be donated. They agreed, and that fabric became part of the starting material alongside words, images, scraps and textiles people brought from their own lives.
From Fifty To More Than 280 Banners
We thought around fifty banners would make a strong installation. More than 280 individual and collective contributions eventually arrived. Once they started coming in, the project became partly curatorial as well as participatory. I worked with volunteers and museum teams to arrange and install very different pieces together in the Herbert’s covered court while trying to keep the character of each contribution visible. The installation opened on 13 May 2022 and remained on public display through the summer.
Seeing all those banners together changed the scale of the project completely. Some were highly worked textile pieces, some were simple words or drawings, and some were made by people who would never have described themselves as artists. Putting them together in one of the museum’s largest spaces gave everyday concerns, political messages, humour and personal stories the same public visibility. People brought family and friends back to find their own banner in the installation, which was exactly the kind of ownership I had hoped the project might create.
Legacy & Research
The Coventry Banner continued beyond the Herbert exhibition and later found a permanent home at Coventry Central Hall. It also became the subject of published research. Dr Rachel Marsden examined the project in Social Works? Journal of Social Art Practice, where I was described as the project instigator. University of Birmingham research in Midlands Art Papers later used The Coventry Banner as a case study in co production at the Herbert and traced how the relationships around it continued into later community work.
Material Reuse
The donated PROCESSIONS sashes mattered for another reason too. Reusing them instead of buying new cloth fitted the resourceful way I had learned to work at the Herbert, where community projects often had tiny or nonexistent material budgets. Asking, sharing, adapting and reusing became part of the making process itself, and that line of thinking continues through the sustainability approach in my manifesto.
Related Work
The Banner makes most sense alongside the Turner Prize 2021 community engagement that came before it, the King Edward VI College artist residency where I tested the banner method with foundation students, and Divided Selves, where questions around flags, identity and collective voice developed further. The Herbert’s original Make A Banner For Coventry invitation and Coventry Banner launch record provide the museum’s public record of the project.
