Have you ever made rosehip syrup or jam? Send me some tips if you have. Our rosa rugosa has produced huge amounts of rose apples. Those giant rosehips whose flesh tastes almost peachy. The are calling to be prepared and preserved for eating.
Welcome to my weekly studio notes, 36 of 52, 2025. These notes are written by me without the use of AI. They are part of my ecology of practices; time and space to reflect on the week gone by, share some insights, ask you a question, offer some resources and have a view to my week ahead. They started out with a narrower version of work and have expanded, morphed to this unruly meander of all of what’s here this week.
Autumn has settled in with starry nights, heaving fruit and berries, a mast year for acorns and lowering temperatures.
How was your week?
My week was a curious mix of the radical act of rest, research, preparation, thinking and tackling under employed.
Let’s jump in.
Reflection
Week 36 seemed to have gone by very quickly. Work has been taken up with preparations for research plus conference talks and workshops coming up in September.
I applied for a job but got no confirmation email to say it had been received… I am preparing other applications. Still under employed I aim to sort it out as soon as possible. The stress has been brutal. There is always plenty of work to be done but it has to get resourced.
Thursday I was in IMMA, Staying with the trouble. Friday a really interesting visit to a social farm near Gorey, Co. Wexford.
Primary research is very different in person especially if there is a physical space and place to also enquire and discover. Walking and talking has its own pace and momentum. Documenting without recording becomes an act of immediate synthesising. Capturing key words and phrases in rapid note talking on my phone. Without it being intrusive or causing pause in the conversation.
Farms as a workplace are intriguing and resourceful spaces. Managing health and safety on a farm is a significant burden especially when there are different kinds of skills, experiences and traditions mixing on a farm.
Although Thursday morning in IMMA was a half a day for the NWC Feminist Communities for Climate Justice creative group to meet and see the Staying with the trouble exhibition, it occupied and is still occupying my brain space.
I’d seen the exhibition in June and wanted an eco-femnist discourse around it. So I suggested such a thing to Vanessa and Sadhbh who run the Femnist Community for Climate Justice Network. We chatted about it and I bridged a connection to IMMA via my network. Interestingly when this happens I am normally dropped off conversations as those business conversations continue. But I was included and kept showing up to support the fruition of my idea and the synergy I could see.
In 2020 after the Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance course, I did some work on understanding values. I made this kinda crappy basic video about it.
Post the discussion it has come to mind again. Along with the systems we live in – what values are we living with? What values are shaping our lives, our world?
I have really come to Donna Haraway’s work through art and this exhibition. It demanded I more deeply enquired. So I have.
Have you seen the exhibition? Do you know Haraway’s work? If you do go to see the work I’d recommend a guided tour they are free as is entrance to see this cultural tour de force. It runs until the 21st of September in the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
When I saw the exhibition I did n’t really understand it, it challenged me. I am interested in art and culture. But visual art I’d be critical enough of my own gaps in understanding or reading it. But I don’t overly want to intellectually analyse why I like a piece of art. I tend to want to understand the artists motivation, process and ideas behind the work to greater or lesser extents right. Sometimes it’s good to just look at art and enjoy it or not. This exhibition is different because it sets out to be. In that way it is very successful.
But I did not think it was very critical of itself especially as it was dealing with the biggest challenges of our time. From a climate eco-femnist perspective I wanted a group to view the exhibition and discuss it with this perspective. I was delighted that the NWC Feminist Communities for Climate Justice creative group were interested to go. I love the team at IMMA, I think they are doing an important role making the cultural space a space for everyone.
I was asked would I hosted the post exhibition conversation and I was delighted to, I appreciate it was acknowledged to need resourcing. Lunch and travel were provided for the whole group attending and I really appreciated that care. Although it was during a weekday morning which for those working full time may have been a challenge.
Having a guided tour of the exhibition, where 2 of the 5 curators spoke about the overall exhibition. Curation and the themes of
- tentacular thinking
- making kin
- compost
- critters
- techno apocalypse
- sowing worlds
was very different, and an easier arriving into the exhibition. I was fascinated about which pieces they choose to focus and speak about. They would not have been my choice for this audience. But hence the joy of different cultural perspectives.
Over the last few weeks I have been doing a deep dive on Haraway’s work, a learning and thinking board has 32 notes of varying complexity. I’ve started threading and looking at shades of difference and sameness across writers, thinkers and storytellers whose work has been meaningful. Le Guin, Joanna Macy, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Dougald Hine. There are other inputs I am navigating and making sense of, formulating for sharing forward.
I’ve not completely decided what form myself expression from the exhibition will be, I will go back to see it again next weekend as I’ll be in IMMA for Earth Rising. I think with time I will make a creative response, for sure I am staying with it right now. The themes of speculative fabulation and making kin, symbiosis and care are central to all of my work.
Insights
Work can expand into the all spaces I inhabit. Not only are boundaries important but time boxing especially in view of budgets and contracted work too. This is one of the challenges of working on purpose and being self employed. The work is compelling and rewarding.
I have time. I have the skills and intellect. Why would I not apply that to the best of my ability. I can’t only give the resourced X amount of my ability to the thing, I find that really hard.
But what I give freely extra of my intellect and time steals from other areas of my life, from growing our food, resourcing us as a family, spending time with kin, making and maintance, play, creativity, dancing and rest .
My first viewing of Staying with the Trouble attracted and repelled me across the artist work. Video art can be challenging for me to interpret but one of my favourite pieces from the exhibition is Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse, 2023 by Venus Patel. When you’ve seen this work ping me I want to talk about it.
In terms of critical awareness of materiality and socio-economic critical discourse Kerry Guinan’s work From a series of six canvases is the most profound for me. I’d imagine people just walk by it. It was not one pulled out by the curators to discuss but to me is one of the most relevant.
The three canvases are signed by the people who made them in a factory in Dominican Republic for Daley Rowney. Now that is a starting point for a broader discussion on decolonisation of art, labour on top of labour, cultural work on top of factory work. From a eco-femnist climate cultural perspective I’d have included this piece. It being blank except for signatures is a profound tension in a bastion of the arts. I wonder if a black rectangle shape painted around the background to draw attention to these three pieces would that make it more significant. A comment also on binary thinking, labour and work in direct commentary of art as elitism or leisure. Even writing that feels elitist because I’ve had time to think about it because I am not in a genocide and I was born by chance into Irish society.
That work has a deepening relationship in the technology offensive of automation of art through large language models and visual vomit being produced by AI. As it does to the large canvases painted in oils opposite it in the exhibition that explore modernism at scale, the warehouse of an e-commerce site. Not a favourite but still a fascinating subject for someone to paint in such a meticulous way.
Laura Fitzgerald, I AM MAD, 2024 about hay bales is another favourite. Not just in the way she has re-imagined the bales but for me the shadow play behind the work also captivated me. I wonder how many noticed?
The irony is not lost on me, the shadows of the work title I AM MAD is what I took away initially from Staying with the Trouble.
digital play & editing exploring colour, abstract patterning.
Roisin Markham 2025
In an Ireland where creativity and madness are often a cultural tightrope this was also mentioned during the lunch post exhibition and discussion. There is a deep relationship with Irish madness, ancestral and cultural context along with medical and economics. In my own context this is a deep well which I’ll not get into now.
In an Irish context are we not still recovering from colonisation, decolonisation may just be starting in a deeper way. Are we ready to remind ourselves of who we are? At the moment we are still embracing all forms of what the colonisers convinced us was success.
You might notice Laura’s work is monochromatic and my response to it was to bring it into full colour, exploring behind the work literally and the shadows it cast. This is a deep insight into who I am.
I work on wellbeing economy and systemic change because I want us to live in a meaningful value system. GDP does not tell me anything about if we are living well. It does not tell me about if you were you resourced. If you nourished yourself through food, care, community and kin.
GDP does not respond to the crisis of genocide, war or dismantling of human rights nor to biodiversity loss or climate change, soil erosion, crisis of loneliness, housing or health.
Wellbeing is a human right but it’s seems to be an afforded privilege to a few. Mental ill health is present across all communities but stresses of inequality, injustice and discrimination stretch and deepen shadows across minorities, disability, gender identity, new locals and class. Irish people don’t like to recognise class but it exists and I have lived experience of it.
If neo-liberal economics theory was correct, economics would have sorted out poverty by now. It does not. So we need new economic thinking that works for these times and for all of us.
I’m a person who’s in really curious about things and really interested in how we might live well, and what that means.
Ireland as a value system in which people can live well and live with their fulness of humanity and fully present to all. How we are just part of the ecosystem on the earth, not the apex, not at the top, but as part.
And so the themes of compost and critters and speculative fabulation, like fables and storytelling and an artist making really creative, really different kind of work, some much more accessible, some much more then others, some really inventive, really challenging work to look at that bridging is really interesting.
Partly this weeks reflection and insight is about making things more visible, because that is also the work I do.
Sunday 7 September 1944, Donna Haraway was born, I kinda love that as I write I am celebrating her on her birthday.
So I am still staying with the trouble. More on this to come but for now I’m leaving it here.
I was also present to the fact that this week last year was the week Kate Raworth was in town and IDEN hosted her in IMMA.
IMMA September 2024
I am so over due a follow up with the IDEN network.
A question for you
How many people did you have a conversation with last week, not counting the people you live or work with?
Resources
It’s Autumn and the bounty of the soil, sun and rain yields us food in plenty. Learning how to preserve food is a skill I need to relearn. So knowing how to sterilise jars for jams, chutneys and preserves is important.
Do you repair or maintain things? Ireland has a website called Repair my stuff that I’ve spoken about before but I came across the Maintance Manifesto and study guide this week and found the language really refreshing. Here is the Maintainers Study Guide. I’m particularly interested in the tension of innovation and novelty and would like a discussion on it, let me know if this is something that interests you.
This also leans into permaculture and one of their principles of rejecting novelty that I have spoken about before.
In relation to maintaining care of ourselves and our hearts this song is a good anthem in the face of ongoing genocide, war, discrimination and extremism. Don’t harden your heart…
Food continues to be a significant theme in my thinking especially as I prepare for the conference workshop next week. So I am sharing several resources here.
Feeding ourselves is hosting a Local Food Symposium October 30th 2025 in TCD. How can we better support local food producers and nourish communities through stronger local food economies in Ireland? A day of exploration, animation and strategising.
A view to the week ahead
Research on Social Farming continues.
On Thursday I’ll be speaking and running a workshop at the Healthy Ireland Conference, Building Resilient Futures Through Local Government.
I’m putting a talk and slides together for 15 minutes initial introduction of concepts on
- wellbeing economy
- new economic thinking and 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist
- why we can’t build solutions with a capitalist framework – dismantling the master house
- data as tools for change while recognising data does not tell us everything (also might allude to my collection of wellbeing indicators)
- lived experience, co-design and co-production
- community asset and wealth building
- carbon blindness
- 3 horizon thinking
- resourcing the work of community development
- post-growth society
it’s a lot to get through in 15 minutes I want to seed the workshop framing within that talk also.
It’s an opportunity to share ideas that work, exemplars and lighthouses. Challenge the business as usual, the orthodoxy, offer new thinking, different pathways.
I will be defining 3 things I want the conference participants to walk away with, what do you think they should be?
I have this big question I’ve been living with for over a year on resourcing and financing differently – how might we build something in the new paradigm that relocates the centre of the value system through example?
If you have answers or are interested in building that I’m all ears.
Earth Rising is on next weekend, if you are going let me know what you are looking forward to seeing, more details here.
Have a great week.
Roisin Markham 
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