Talking Birds x Slow Boat: Repair & Skill Share Workshop
Friday 18th September 2026 1.30-3pm
Throughout 2026, Ikon Youth Programme is reimagining SlowBoat as a changing space for making, learning and gathering. Across the year SlowBoat becomes an exhibition space, a radio broadcasting studio, a classroom and an artist’s studio.
For this session with Talking Birds, SlowBoat is transformed into a Repair Workshop.
After F13 (network meeting open to all locally-based creatives) at The Nest 11am-12.30pm on the Third Friday of September, join us on SlowBoat (moored at Coventry Canal Basin) for a Repair & Skill Share Workshop led by Talking Birds with Coventry textile artist (and slow stitch legend) Julia O’Connell. Bring something you’d like to repair, mend or rethink, and spend the afternoon helping each other fix things, sharing practical skills and learning from one another.
This workshop is part of Ikon Youth Programme’s artist-led approach to practising the practice of alternative education. Rather than separating studio practice from learning, artists embed their own ways of making and experimenting within each session. Workshops become spaces for collective experimentation, process-led inquiry and shared forms of knowledge exchange.
We particularly welcome emerging artists and young people aged 16–21 to join us for this workshop.
About Slow Boat
With the support of Freelands Foundation, over six years (2021-27) Ikon Youth Programme (IYP) navigates the waterways on board Slow Boat, a converted narrow boat. IYP are collaborating with creative thinkers and makers to reimagine SlowBoat as a local art school.
About IYP
Ikon Youth Programme (IYP) is a group of emerging artists, designers, writers, photographers, policy makers and earth scientists (16–21yrs). We co-lead programming, exhibitions and events, working with regional and national artists through workshops, shared resource and ongoing knowledge exchange. Ikon Youth Programme is funded by Freelands Foundation.
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