Cheryl Jones, Nathaniel Pitt & Matt Westbrook
In 2011 Eastside Projects and Extra Special People curated a year of residencies of Midlands based artists in Bill Drummond’s Curfew Tower in Northern Ireland.

‘Honk! If You 'Heart' Contemporary Art’ is a bumper sticker, a projection and now a billboard! A call to arms, a call to honk. Solidarity is sought amongst those of us who both drive and feel deep affection for all art contemporary -
a survey of drive-bys, a riot of beeps and horns.

Nathaniel, Cheryl and Matt lived for two weeks in the Cushendall Tower, residents of the Turnley folly, a folly whose origins were founded as a deterrent for idlers and rioters in 19th Century Northern Ireland. In a tragic twist of irony, this tower once built as a symbol of industrious virtue, is now the donuting, boy-racing centre of a nightly ritualistic
gathering of Cushendall's youth, sat in their cars all night, engines Idling, jostling for prime position, posturing. A riot of beeping, revving and burning rubber up and down the high street. Here the very foundations of the Turnley folly shake, the dungeon reverberates with the double deep beep-beep. Beep-beep. Honk-honk.

At Cushendall Tower the image of ‘loving contemporary art’ was intended as a deterrent, to stop the endless honking, in order to allow the artists some sleep. On the façade of Eastside Projects the billboard poster acts as a wry and knowing comment on the fickle position of contemporary art in the public consciousness. At Cushendall Tower the hope was for zero honks, at Eastside Projects the hope is one honk for every inhabitant of our great city of Birmingham – estimated to be one million, thirty six thousand, eight hundred and seventy eight!