on collaboration and exchange

A long term friend and teaching partner, the British sculptor Richard Wentworth, introduced us to Andy Holden at the start of the Nestworks project, when we were trying to improve our understanding of how urban birds interacted with the city. We’d been told he was working on a lecture about birdsong and wondered if he would be interested in making some sort of contribution to the project.

“You don’t need me,” he said when we met in a café near London Bridge, “you need my dad!” Peter Holden, Andy’s dad, made the RSPB’s Young Ornithologists Club (membership: 168,000) the biggest children’s wildlife organisation in the world, started the Big Garden Birdwatch and was the bird man on Blue Peter during its Seventies/Eighties glory days.

Thus began a series of extraordinary bird walks with Peter. The theme of the London Festival of Architecture, which we were commissioned to contribute to with an ecological legacy project, was exchange: of knowledge, habitat and materials. Our conversations and walks offered this in spades! Meanwhile, Andy was researching how birds made nests with his dad, which developed into A Lecture on Nesting, a joint lecture presented as part of our public programme for the festival.

Seven years later, after a few more joint lectures, including one on Birdsong, the presentation became Natural Selection, an exhibition in the former Newington Library in south London, a work of incredible emotional intelligence that was one of the critical hits of 2017. You can read more about it here.

Fittingly, the original artwork and research for the Lecture on Nesting was acquired by the Tate in 2020.