Roisin Markham

Last year felt like most people feel about Turnip. I’m glad it’s finished.

It was nt all bad but it did feel difficult, quagmire, challenges, stress but in the end it all came good. I balanced it out and chose acceptance rather than compliance.

I’ve been noodling what to do with my blog space. Consistency sometimes take longer then we think to yield potential. But the formal structure of my 2025 studio notes offered just that and restricted some other form of expression.

Weirdly I found myself writing less about the things that I was thinking about and I’d like more fluidity there. Acknowledging these are my own rules and I’m working out loud here. So I thought this week I’d just write and see what happened.

I’m curious over the seasonal break, Christmas and New Years round these parts what did you find yourself speaking to people about?

It interested me what really bubbles to the surface? What we ‘storify’ not a real word but what do we share of our lives of a year, our experience and culture as a context. When we shrink a year into a couple of sentences what do we shape? What’s the narrative of 2025 for you? When I was thinking about this it felt almost a memory card, condensing a narrative, the act of shaping as a response to “How have you been since I last saw you?”

I found myself in the company of good friends from university, people who’ve known each other through decades of change: career shifts, babies & child rearing (mine), ill health, London, Boston, Dublin, Italy, USA – city and rural living, marriages, divorces (theirs), death and grief of close loved ones ~ parents and a husband. We are of that age.

They don’t live in Ireland so I rarely get to see them. That’s typically once a year. We have an active whatsapp that replaced the long letters we used to write to each other in the 90’s & 00’s.

Somewhere in the reconnection I found myself talking about something that surprised me – art. Staying with the Trouble, the IMMA exhibition of contemporary Irish artists that engaged me with Donna Harways work of the same name. I went to the exhibition 4 times, not sure an exhibition has had such a profound effect on me. Specific piece of art yes, like The Nightwatchman by Rembrandt, Marlin Monroe by Andy Warhol but not a whole exhibition as such. IMMA’s framing of Staying with the trouble was a wild ride of meeting art, artists, curation and wanting to understand it more deeply. I engaged with this exhibition in June until September.

So when I shrank everything in my year to a short narrative that’s what we chatted about!

Understanding Harways work and doing a deep dive on it, having two of the curators do a tour was so insightful (week 36 2025). But it’s the art I storified, codified into my 2025 experience and what I shared – the critters weird stitched hanging art that challenged my own assumptions about artists who make work like that, Venus Patels video work and the evangelism and baptism of queer perspective. Her work lets me speak about gendered language and normative thinking in a very different way. This led to an interesting discussion about discomfort with overt queerness that I felt was culturally different since the Irish Referendum on Gay Marriage. The conversation through explaining the video and why I found it so meaningful opened up a sharing of otherness we might never have had, my friends reality of Italy and the US have very different experiences. It’s interesting to see how our mental models are different. I got to talk about the acknowledgment of other peoples experiences and voices as central to their lived realities not ours. Having several LGBTQ+ friends and colleagues and what they have been experiencing this year maybe makes me more attuned to inclusion.

But it’s not just that. Perhaps the essence of that conversation about centralising lived experiences is actually a foundational principle of who I am and of my own significant work this year.

That codified story it’s also why co-design and co-production is so important. Perhaps I ended up talking about my work after all just that the art was a vehicle for access.

As I preparer to lecture on Effective Climate Communications to the TCD Climate Entrepreneurs Postgraduate course tomorrow I’m also thinking about mental models and cognitive bias.

As Clare Murphy the storyteller says ‘a good story can topple kings’.

In recalling the exhibition of Staying with the trouble I found it hard to express and share the depth of Atsushi Kaga. So I’m articulating it here. Every time I connect into this exhibition different works and artist demands more depth.

The work of Atsushi Kaga that filled a room dimly lit with hanging hand painted owls on each, with Japanese and Irish heritage the artists works in a specific style imbued with so much symbolism and so much beauty it steals the heart and the breath.

The contrast in that work to the lard sculpture by Katie Watchorn, Surrogate I| (field), 2021. The drawing and video work and mixed media sculptural work was spectacular and tentacular for sure.

The art work of this exhibition comes back to me as different images, filtered and cut in different ways. I glimpse the art seemingly lucid yet dream like. I still want to grasp it and even with writing now go seek more information about the artists and their work.

Saturday at Lady’s Island with the small art collective forming around being creatively present to the water body that is Lady’s Island Lake (lagoon) I had an image form in my head that inhind sight is really influenced by Farouk858, I am Cú, 2022 3D video piece.

Here is one of the curators speaking about his work and IMMA’s engagement with the Nigerian-Irish artist whose multidisciplinary practice is driven by the conviction that computer-generated technologies can significantly enhance human experiences.

My brain interweaves the visual, intellectual and cultural threads of all my experiences. But in the distillation of life, family & friends, work & colleagues, community and collectives what’s remembered? What gets a second outing or a third?

What gets codified in our language in our identity in our culture? and how does that shape our present and futures?

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I choose to listen to the Blindboy Boatclub podcast on the drive down to Ladys Island his Christmas episode. I’d never heard anyone refer to the Sun entering the light box and illuminating the inner chamber at Newgrange on the Winter solstice in that way, not overtly but still sexualising the sun male and earth female energies and ancient mythology.

He also spoke about teen boys in Scotland studying his short story work and how he hoped it would be as significant for them as Liam O’Flaherty’s The Sniper was for him at that age. He references his writing on nature but I can’t see that in the catalogues of Liam O’Flahertys work. So I wondered about his statement that most people writing from the third voice relate that to God but Liam O’Flaherty used the third voice as nature.

It resonated with me because I’ve come to understand the indigenous wisdom of Our Land comes from deeply listening and being in relation to ecological, attuning to the eco-system. The Irish language attests to this and codifies it into context.

So my sense is that I am still wintering. Feeling into the year. I’m excited for it.

January hello! Let’s have some fun.