What Do You Do? 2017 – 2018

Extracts from a year in the life of a Creative Entomologist.

In 2017 I made probably the most difficult decision of my life to date, if indeed it really was a decision when it came down to it. Having salvaged one of my longest-standing, most beautiful friendships from the rubble, it feels…hmm…not as though anything is possible, but that something worthwhile is always possible.

I received an important piece of wisdom at the time: Sometimes there is no good or bad decision, there is only the one that you make. The first time I volunteered in Madagascar, I learnt something similar. You commit to that spot on the far side of the river and you leap. That’s how you move through the forest.

After that cryptic introduction, let me tell you about some of the work-related leaps I made in 2017, and how they will shape the coming year of Creative Entomology for better or for worse.

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Next week I’m returning to my favourite village in Madagascar to carry out the Wild Postcard Project with SEED Madagascar! I’ll spend four weeks there, running an art competition to produce Sainte-Luce-wildlife-themed postcards for the charity to sell to support their valuable work in the area. There will of course be a special insects/invertebrates category! I’m eager to work out how many postcards I should print – please contact me on Facebook if you would like to register your interest in buying a pack or donate towards the costs of art materials, prizes and printing.

Club Atsatsaky with butterflies for Sainte Luce’s World Environment Day festival 2011

Upon my return in mid-February, I will be available to lead bug workshops and nature outings for a primary school near you (if you live in the greater Dublin area), subsidised by the Heritage Council! That’s because I’ve been chosen for the Heritage in Schools panel 2018 – 2020!

It’s appropriate that I’m returning to Madagascar with my artist’s hat on, because 2017 was the year I really got my art buzz back, on the inspirational Bee Time residency at Emerson College. It opened my eyes to our complicated relationship with the honey bee and the importance of creating art with the communities in which we live. I made a bee line for the Bee Time HQ in Spain later in the year, visiting the land which the beetimers are healing for the bees, and becoming pleasantly embroiled in some plotting to bring a Bee Time residency to Ireland…

Insect walk for the Bee Time exhibition at Emerson College, East Sussex

Last year I also applied for a pollinator art commission from Laois and Offaly County Councils. Didn’t get it. Made the art anyway. My video collaboration with the public in Laois and Dublin, More than Bees: Lesser Known Tips for Pollinator Conservation, was screened in Dunamaise Arts Centre during Heritage Week, thanks to the Laois Heritage Officer Catherine Casey. I also made some lovely beekeeper friends!

2017 saw the launch of my first solo exhibition, BUGONIA, built around the prints, paintings, and sound pieces I created in those two fruitful weeks at Bee Time, and hosted by Bí URBAN in Stoneybatter. What a calm yet thought-provoking space Kaethe Burt O’Dea has created! I’m excited to get involved in her Lifeline Project in 2018. The aim is “to create a flow of biodiversity from the Botanic Gardens to the Liffey as a living laboratory where the citizens of Dublin’s Northwest Inner city can map and measure the value of re-partnering with nature in the urban environment.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, and for Remembrance Day for Lost Species, I held a pollinator video workshop and a poetry and music evening at St. Michan’s Church, generously supported by Phibsboro Tidy Towns and Church of Ireland. A poetry competition and open call for musicians for the pollinator event led to many interesting international connections with insect poets and bug festival organisers! Opportunities are sticking to me like flies to fly paper! Which reminds me of another piece of wisdom I’ve been keeping close at hand this past year:

The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.

Jason C. Roberts

My volunteer role as intercultural workshops coordinator with Discovery Gospel Choir brought me to Hatch Hall direct provision centre. I effectively communicated what I’m passionate about to the centre’s management and I was invited to run two chaotic creative entomology workshops with some amazing children. We created a “music video” for the song Inchworm, which featured Geometrid moths and their loopy caterpillars!

Some colourful fun for kids stuck in the mind-numbing system of direct provision

My most unusual work location this year was probably at the side of a road in Terenure. My Dublin Canvas painting of Staphylinus dimidiaticornis, a rove beetle of wet grasslands and fens, has been popular with the Instagrammers of South Dublin, where I continue to carry out insect surveys for the County Council’s Heritage Officer, Rosaleen Dwyer.

I published a short note (my first!) with my entomological hero Roy Anderson and Laila Higgins in the Irish Naturalists’ Journal, about a ground beetle we found along the Dodder: The status of Trechus subnotatus (Dejean) (Coleoptera: Carabidae) in Ireland, with a new site in the Dublin area.

Catchin’ grasshoppers with my wonderful intern-for-the-day Tyler. Want to volunteer in 2018?

I look back at the post I wrote about my fibromyalgia in 2016 and wonder how I’ve managed to hurtle through so many bizarre and exciting projects and experiences in the last year, under a job title I invented for myself, during a really difficult period of personal change, without collapsing. Two things were key to this being possible:

1. I learnt to ask for help. And friends, family, choir mates and people who had never met me before gave it in abundance. The term ‘sole trader’ is misleading – it takes a village to raise a business!
2. I learnt to embrace anger as a powerful force for change, put it into physical action, and it freed up so much energy. Anger, like pain, is just a feeling telling you that something needs to change. Listen to it.

Let the raging fire in your belly propel you forward in 2018. Put on some red boots. Practice saying “yes” and “no” and “help!” in a loud, clear voice. Kick through your inhibitions and frustrations. Imagine yourself standing in your favourite habitat, in peak bug-spotting form. Leap over that river and march right up to what makes you happy. You will find something very worthwhile there.