In prison slang, serving time is often called ‘doing a bird’. The cuckoo, with its reputation for intrusion, displacement and marking the hours with its call, becomes a fitting stand-in for the experience of ‘prison time’. As artist in residence in HMP Springhill, I identified myself as both cuckoo and cuckooed.

This sound work reimagines the acoustics of HMP Springhill. I replaced familiar markers of time (locks, key chains, radios, gates, bell, sirens) with the call of a cuckoo, transforming the prison soundscape into birds that sing like metal gates, radio static and chains. At IKON Gallery Birmingham, the process was inverted: concrete and metal chirped like birds.

The work seeks to collapse the boundaries between inside and outside, confinement and freedom, through the uncanny use of birdsong.