Nest (2024)

"The bird a nest, the spider a web, (hu)man friendship"

Nest explored feelings of home and belonging, whilst connecting communities with the natural world around them. The project culminated around three communal events of constructing large human size nests using foraged natural materials.

To make a nest is to learn from the birds that we share our landscape and make temporary home with the materials available to hand. It suggests resilience, the ability to begin from scratch in new place, using ingenuity to work with nature rather than imposing upon it. It is something that we must build and work towards.

Mircea Eliade (historian, fiction writer, philosopher) suggests that it is the home (refuge) that makes sense of, that brings stability to the chaos of the world – without it, a person is without shelter, lost in unreality, fragmented. Home is of the sacred - it saves us from the profane and provides respite. It is a place from which we build our own worlds. But ‘home’ is not exclusively pinned to a singular point of origin in the world. It can be a physical building, it can be a community, but it can also be transient, the sense of security that can be carried within yourself. 

The idea of home is embedded in something wider and deeper – when we look out from the place of safety that the ‘home’ provides, we see the horizon and the horizon is the beginning of imagination. Home/refuge, (whatever shape it is), offers us the opportunity to think beyond and opens us to the discovery to what is elsewhere.

Nest was co-produced by We Live Here, working in Hull with Freedom Festival and in Morecambe and Heysham with Lancaster Arts. It was created through a program of walks, conversations, and creative actions with local people in both places. The collaborative building process was captured on film resulting in a video installation presented inside a shipping container.

Nest, Freedom Festival, Hull City, (29 Aug – 1 Sep); Landing festival, Morecambe, Lancaster, (28 – 30 June); Heysham, Lancaster, (1 June).