Wislawa Szymborska is one of my all-time favourite poets. My friend Ania gifted me her book ‘Miracle Fair’ in 2010 and I have been devouring her words and sometimes crying over them for a decade now.

How many times each line changes and means something new?

That’s what I love about Poetry, the power it has to enter into a deeper vein in my mind and slash or gently pry open ideas that forge new paths.

I am thinking of Wislawa today. Earlier in the year, I thought I had lost ‘Miracle Fair’ and I was anxious for a long time. It always lived beside John O’Donohue’s ‘Anam Cara’. They were Soul Friends. In a big covid declutter job, I found the two of them. They had sneaked off together and landed on a shelf that is always too high for me to reach. I think they needed some alone time from the pressure I put on their pages.

This was recorded in 2014 for my partner. He was on a trip to Norway. We had just met and he was there for weeks on end on an arts residency and exhibition install. Because I loved him immediately, I wanted to send him every bit of everything I loved, so I recorded every thing I could, including some embarrassing tin whistle recordings that felt right at the time.

The audio was made on an old iPhone and you can hear the shuffling of the pages of the book, which I like. I haven’t edited any of the sounds out as they capture a moment in time. If I was to record it again, it would lose all of that.

The painting is from a collection of paintings I made about clouds in 2011 and 2012. It is called ‘Old Wars’ and is made with oil, ink, charcoal and I think there is some gouache paint in there, it is on canvas, which I don’t like to paint on any more. It measures 100cm x 100cm. It is currently in Bergen in Norway and I haven’t seen it since 2012. The painting was in 3 exhibitions, two in Dublin and one in Bergen. I could tell you more stories about those ‘Up’ Paintings, but I will leave that for another day.