Self portrait, oil paint on canvas paper

North Circular at the Showroom, Q&A with traditional Irish singer Annie Hughes & film director Luke McManus

North Circular is a 'musical documentary' that takes the viewer on a journey through the North Circular Road in Dublin. McManus interweaves the personal and institutional histories of places along the the road, and documents the recent activism of the folk revival scene against their gentrification of the neighbourhood, which includes the saving of The Cobblestone, a beloved pub, host and haven for folk sessions for local singers and musicians, including Lisa O'Neill. 

The film deals with themes that are hard to nail down and lets the stories of those living around the North Circular settle in ambiguity, much like life itself, where joy and sorrow, suffering and recovery, loss and pleasure sit side by each in acknowledgement, without the need to push the other aside, all the more potent and true for their shadow. More ode than essay, the film's directorial voice is quiet and without argument or agenda, letting those in front of the camera do the talking. 

While the film is overwhelmingly hopeful and foregrounds people's capacity to laugh and joke even in the aftermath of displacement and trauma, there are moments of slight discomfort—a filmmaker's happy accidents—that hint at a darker underbelly of society: two men high on heroin dance alongside two Roma women, making them uncomfortable; casual racist remarks are shared between a man giving change to another. North Circular celebrates pride of place without being nationalistic, and brings to the screen the lives of working class Dubliners without tokenism or fetish – the stories belong to those who have lived through them, who tell it in their way. 

Finally, it was an absolute treat to hear Annie Hughes, who opens the film with her gorgeous voice, sing two traditional Irish tunes for the audience at the Showroom. 

Makenna Goodman, The Shame

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes a book comes to you at just the right time, when you didn't know you needed it most. 

Makenna Goodman's superbly written The Shame was one such story. This novel pierced me and recognised me and this current moment to an uncanny degree that my image of the protagonist Alma's Vermont house and garden merged with the very new, real experience of moving into my new house in and having a garden of my own for the very first time. 

The feeling that a book could have been written with you and your history in mind is curious. The sense of seeing and knowing you get from a person you don't know but who speaks (to you? to a group of yous? to a person they imagined could be like you or completely different from you?) from text on a page is, in rare but precious instances, like magic, a challenge to the time space continuum as well as to the idea that you are individual, unique, in a manner both humbling and disarming.  

Phlegm: Pandemic Diaries at Millennium Gallery

As Small As Eyes At Bloc Projects

An exhibition on the octopus. Texts as part of a sound piece: 

Philip Guston at the Tate Modern

Always amazing to see a retrospective of one of your favourite painters - I've loved Gustin's work since I learned about it in a post-war figurative painting seminar at The University of Edinburgh during my year abroad in 2012. I especially enjoyed his tender depictions of his wife, Musa McKim, and discovering their poetic/drawing collaborations. 

Painting of a Sicilian Christmas cake

Haven't painted acrylic on canvas since I was 15 so it was a real treat to get back into it!