Contemporary Community Textile Artist Derbyshire UK
Collaboration Kindness Carbon Sensitivity
King Edward VI College
Artist In Residence
Testing Collaborative Banner Making With Foundation Art Students
Period
2021
My Role
Artist In Residence
Project Type
Education And Artist Residency
Location
Nuneaton, Warwickshire
Project Overview
As a textile artist in residence at King Edward VI College in Nuneaton, I used the residency as an important testing ground for ideas that later fed into The Coventry Banner. I worked with foundation art students on individual and collaborative banner making, using the residency to test materials, instructions and ways of inviting people into a process without telling them what their finished work should look like.
Testing Before Scaling Up
Because I already had a relationship with the college, the students were able to be direct with me. They had creative confidence and were used to critique, so they could tell me when an instruction was unclear, when a material choice got in the way, or when a process felt too controlled. That honesty was exactly what I needed before trying to take a banner project to a much wider public. I wrote about this trial stage in my earlier Turner Prize 2021 community engagement.
What The Students Taught Me
The residency reinforced that participation needs to be designed with people rather than simply delivered to them. A process that looks obvious to the person who created it can feel completely different to somebody meeting it for the first time. Testing with the students helped me simplify the eventual banner making guidance and gave me more confidence to leave room for different levels of skill, time and ambition.
From Residency To Coventry Banner
The college later appeared in the official Coventry Moves credits alongside participating students and makers, connecting this small residency to the wider City of Culture network. The public record is still there in the Coventry Moves credits. What I learned in Nuneaton then fed directly into The Coventry Banner, where the instructions and participation model had to work for hundreds of people rather than one classroom.
