This week I write with that surprising feeling of is it a dream?
Catherine Connolly has been elected Irelands 10th President, it gives me hope. But it feels like a thin veil which seems apt for this time of the year as we head towards Halloween.
Week 43 of 52, 2025 brings official Winter time here in Ireland, the clocks have gone back. This is the time of shortened daylight. Heavier skies and days that fold in on themselves.
Last week was challenging.
Welcome to these weekly studio notes where I reflect on the week that was, find insights, ask a question of you the reader, share some resources and look to the week ahead.
I write these as a warm messy collection of all my work. My weekly studio notes have become a kaleidoscope of noticing. A compendium of the week across where my energy has been at play. I don’t use AI for my weekly notes because this writing is an important part of my ecology of practices.
Let’s jump in
Reflection
It was a week of good work
- delicious deep dives into data and research, stretching myself as a qualitative resarcher to analyse quantitive results, deeply under understanding cross tabulation between all the data, documenting and visualising it, synthesising and interpreting it, building insights and recommendations
- creating an event design playbook, where the design gets tested and has to be robust for me to put it in writing, this process defines and consolidates a plan around the success of an event, preproduction, event production & facilitation, postproduction, and bringing that view to the team
- Delivery of a bespoke workshop facilitating active listening and creativity to PhD and Post Docs with Maynooth Works as part of Maynooth University Research Week 2025, attending to nurturing human nature and prosocial behaviour, fascinating insights shared in the unpack by participants
In many ways the challenges are nothing to do with my work and everything to do with how I offer all of who I am to the broader ecosystem of labour, skills, knowledge and citizenship.
The challenge came last week in a breaking of trust and lack of integrity in one of the places I share my voluntary labour. It’s absorbed time I did not have. Time that was committed elsewhere in my big list of spaces I want to contribute in. It stole emotional labour and cognitive load. Yes, it not a simple thing. No I shall not be discussing it in any detail. I have given myself the weekend to think about it. Decisions, outcomes, amendments and ongoing management of the situation still need my attention. I don’t need it. But it arrives in my field and holds my attention until it’s resolved. It needs consideration and communication and care. Arrogance and lack of integrity with extractive behaviour are not taken lightly nor easily.
I am fortunate to have around me, some very good people, with whom I trust and could unpack the issues in confidence. Good council is to be had with my associates and those I’ve built deep relationships with since asking ~ how do we create a future worth living into?
This week there was plenty of rewarding work which I really enjoyed. Maynooth Works was a lot of fun to deliver, work with participants on active listening, creativity and play, nurturing human nature and tangential knowledge to research, the importance of networks and there longitudinal value.
I structured my week so I could travel north and see two exhibitions on Friday with Malú Colourín. What a joy Friday was, I voted and then we went to see Alice Fox’s work in Lisburn and Interwoven in Down. Malú is exhibiting beautiful art in Interwoven. She is an extraordinary creative – natural dyer, maker of things including Fibershed Ireland and art and she shares knowledge in all sorts of educational spaces. Her studio is a place of deep knowledge, relationships with kin and alchemy. We are in cahoots and are in each other’s networks of networks.
I wanted to capture an essence of the day so I created this illustration.
Digital illustration – photography digital montage and editing. Roisin Markham
I use Catherine Connolly’s motif from her presidential campaign designed by Anna Cassidy, a young graphic designer from the West of Ireland. It’s already an iconic design.
The background is created through several images of our own place, the Crann Fia Úll in the centre of the garden, an oak leaf and richness of texture and colour of docks and herb robert who’s job is attending to and building soil and feeding finches. Dominating is one of the images from Flaxen, Alice fox’s exhibition shared below.
In my on going volunteering I am over committed. I acknowledge that.
I volunteer, I’ll read government policy and strategy documents and write submissions. I’ll read think tanks position papers and advise them on gaps and insights. I’ll support others wanting to get into action through sharing time, knowledge and encouragement. I will show up as an activist, campaigning for peace, social justice, biodiversity loss and stopping harmful actions to our island and planet. I’ll mop up, tidy up, to make it good and bridge gaps.
Let’s be clear I am the kind of person that has huge capacity for work.
I am looking for work that I can embrace, use a broad variety of my skills, work in or lead a team. Be rewarded appropriately and enjoy the the work.
I’d also love to be taking my future casting and time traveling to more people.
A big insight for me in the last few years is I don’t go back to University to do a masters, I’ll take a job and learn as I go. I self direct my own learning. I take small courses, read listen and engage with subject and frameworks deeply. In spaces that rely on credentials I can feel erased despite all of what I bring. In Maynooth Works I was delighted to meet someone from Social Sciences who is demonstrating that Maynooth University is for everyone.
The balance is off. I am attending to it.
After all I’m not just asking questions I am practicing the future also.
This is all currently active on my desk:
SFI research synthesis and report writing.
Trinity event design and research.
Potential client work responses.
Job interview preparation.
Job applications.
Business administration and book keeping, including following up with organisations to pay me for work delivered.
Dun Laoghaire Rathdown – artist and creative series of workshops on sustainability for creative prationers.
Managing a challenging and tenuous situation as a volunteer leader.
Review and edit Doughnut Economics Family Play two pager for finding funding.
AI positioning paper review for an economic thinktank.
LC Economics Curriculum submission.
Circular economy Policy submission
DCEE/OECD follow up with information.
Review of Funding calls.
Time Travel opportunities.
2 collective meet-ups that are currently work in progress, forming, trib’n.
It’s not including any domestic bliss, health or fitness, creative nor mindfulness practices, food growing, gardening or attending to kin or being in wild spaces.
Is time that expansive?
Insights
One of the reasons I love voting in our village primary school, besides exercising my constitutional right to vote and using my public voice, is the framed stories and photos of old newspaper clippings and school portraits on the wall.
This one always catches my eye every time it’s from 1958 and is a story of love. Yeah guess I am an oul romantic at heart.
Groom was 68-year-old Michael Kinsella, of Ballygarrett, a blacksmith, whose wife died five years ago. He has no children. The bride was 73-year-old Miss Julia McCreary, Bruce, Clonevan, Gorey.
Both bride and groom have excellent health. On their wedding morning they were active and cheerful as they posed for photographs. A large crowd of local people attended the ceremony.
Very Rev. Canon Owen Kavanagh, P.P., performed the ceremony. ‘ Aidan Connors, of Kilmuckridge, was best man, and Mrs. A. Kenny, Bruce, was matron of honour.
* PICTURE SHOWS: The happy couple after the wedding.
This photo of the school from 1930 also caught my eye this year.
Work expands to the time allowed but work also takes the time it does given due diligence to do the work to a standard of excellence. Will good be good enough? Well no because it has to be excellent.
I can’t deliver bad work, it crumples my soul to do that and breaks my brain. The evidence points that using AI may also break our brains.
What are my insights this week?
Finding a good work rhythm and restoring myself well is my biggest priority right now… and also
Art has the ability to be so arresting, so full of beauty that it pauses time.
FLAXEN
Alice Fox a british artist grows plants in her allotment as materials for her creative practice. I fell in love with her stitched leaves, woven natural fibres covering found gardening tools, her deep relationship with plant kin and soil. But mostly because her art fills me with joy, beauty and awe.
I was inspired to learn how to make cordage from natural materials because of her work.
It’s breath taking, I stood and stared.
I felt if I could be quiet enough to listen, the shadows of Alice Fox’s work would whisper back the wind in the field and the sounds of the linnets where the flax grew.
Astonishing.
Such skill to make, to tend to, so much honouring of this plant, flax. Other plants and soil, stones and leaves are also honoured. Alice’s practice is rich and deeply in relationship.
Lisburn also has a Linen Museum which we did not adventure to. Instead we walked Malú’s husky Lobo that goes everywhere and meet up with Helen and Charlie of Mallon Linen. I’d not seen them since the Fibershed AGM last year. It was wonderful to discover all they had been up to and what Helen is working on including links to agriculture and comfrey.
I believe that if our new president, Catherine Connolly can unite a divided left she can unite all of us. We need to connect through commonalities.
She is mnásome. This is a watershed moment where Ireland chooses peace and justice, social and cultural values for this century while loving our language and traditions making spaces for new locals. I believe Catherine Connolly deeply cares about our land and the watersheds, about humanity and our earth.
A question for you
What brings you to quiet awe?
Resources
Oein DeBhairduin the Traveller Activist and writer shared an amazing post about traditions as you approach Halloween. There is great wisdom and learning for us all in this post. I love #3, #6 actually I love them all. What one might you practice?
If you need solace and grief tending, I recommend the work of Megan Devine, Refuge in Grief.
Last week while writing I went back to trying to find good appropriate language audience specific words. I was grappling with an idea and the articulation of it just was not grounded where it needed to be.
I reached for the Visual Thesaurus, I’d almost forgotten about it. Such a joy to engage and play with, have you used it?
Big congratulation to the All Tech Is Human Rebekah Tweed, and award-winning AI Ethicist, Professor Renée Cummings, and ATIH affiliates Heidi Hysell and Savannah Thais on releasing 5 Responsible AI Courses for free:
- Principles of Responsible AI: Identifying, Understanding, and Mitigating Risks
- The History of Responsible AI: From Principles to Professionalization
- Operationalizing AI Governance: Strategy & Foundations
- Operationalizing AI Governance: Execution & Scaling
- Governing Agentic AI Systems
A view to the week ahead
So this week sees the SFI report being completed, a job interview, some interesting meetings, a Feeding Ourselves Food symposium and some catching up with Time Travel buddies from 2030.
There will also be continuing to chase payments, business administration and landing new work.
Then there is Halloween. Our tradition would be to light a bonfire but Wexford County Council put out this post and we have discussed it. So there will be no bonfire instead I’ll be remembering the dead and telling stories. Honouring ancestral wisdom and visiting things places.
Manchan Mangan’s ashes will be spread at Uisneach on the All Saints day, 1 November. It’s an open to the public event, more information here.
It’s a liminal time.
Have a great week.
Roisin Markham 
Leave a comment