It has taken some time to process and reflect on the rich word-hoard generated by the Pibroch project over the last 2 years.

The audiences during the 2023 tour offered hundreds of generous comments, insights and questions which were documented in the Pibroch Artist blog during the course of the tour.

Now is the time to prepare the ground and sow for 2024 and beyond.  We are actively planning more presentations and performances of Pibroch in the new year.  Some will be new work, some reprise of the existing successful format.  Each should contribute to an expanding and enriching conversation about climate justice and how we address the challenges we face in the present and into the future.

I have recognised for years that Pibroch is always going to be a work in progress – incorporating audience insights, elaborating and developing themes – just as the piobaireachd form elaborates on the Urlar.

This winter’s harvest will be served in two courses:  parallel and complementary.

The first is Cruinneachadh – a series of reports and reflections on the research and audience inputs collected in the course of the 2023 tour.  Its feedstock are the myriad perspectives and insights recorded in the Pibroch Artist Blog series: What I heard about Climate Justice.  But, whereas the blogs reported these conversation in a chronological and place-centred way, the Cruinneachadh posts will reflect on these comments and experiences thematically and, where appropriate, bring some of the insights up to date with current developments.

The second is Improvement Notice.  Improvement Notice arose from an intuition during the production and performance of Pibroch that we, collectively, need to re-imagine our pasts in order to imagine the future.

The practice of this work will be manifest in 3 bodies of work, published on this website.

Archeobiography – a selective re-imagining of moments and episodes from the lives of my documented ancestors from the beginning of the early modern period about 500 years ago. In this I am using place, time and imagination to situate the challenges and experiences which, in an epigenetic sense, inform my received sense of self. In this process I have uncovered strands that have been omitted from the dominant narrative of ‘who we were’ so there has been an effort to correct the image distorted by patriarchal, colonialist and extractivist constructs : but also the myths of denial we use to distance ourselves from responsibility, my insistence that my ‘stock’ is/was working class Irish and Gael doesn’t always stand up to close scrutiny.

Autobiography – an earnest attempt to excavate and relay my life experience in context.

Futurography  – a sequence of posts reflecting on the discoveries made in creating the other two strands and conclusions we might draw in imagining a different future.  Sort of ‘letters home’ from the journey.

Elements will be added to (and perhaps amended in) each of these threads as time passes.

I hope, taken together, these elements will provide a rich mulch in which new conversations, assemblies, insights and actions can germinate and flourish in the months & years ahead.