07. Patterns

This week presenter Zoe Comyns is guided by the Keyword ‘Patterns’.
Contributors to the episode have drawn inspiration from patterns of human and bird behaviour, the patterns we ink on to our skin and the patterns which can make a daily routine.
Writer and musician Julian Gough is trying to record a podcast with Solana Joy. They are married and like many professionals are working from their home. The regular interruptions from their cat and their small child form a humorous pattern which becomes the short feature recorded for Keywords.
When writer and artist Sara Baume visited Cape Clear Island in West Cork she learned about vagrant birds which land on the island every year. These are birds which are rerouted accidentally from their migration lines and they inspired Sara to make a series of cross-stitchings representing each species of bird.
Ruth O’Connor is a fashion & design journalist - she looks at how a new community of creatives - designers, craftspeople and costume makers - have come together recently to make face masks; each with their own intricate pattern and how they have ‘created new bonds, communities and friendships - people of all ages and backgrounds woven together like warp and weft’.
Writer Siobhán Mannion looks at how the lifelong pattern of gift-giving - ‘handknitted wools, and your vast array of patterned scarves’ - can establish deep family bonds. These are maintained, via memory and the objects themselves, after the loss of a loved one. Her short essay features music composed by Cian Roche.
Elaine Howley is a sound artist and in her composition we hear a musical treatment of how - possibly obsessive - thoughts about another person can flow and ebb in sonic waves. 'I am falling into a thought about you again. I am a thought. I am you again. I am a thought about a thought... '
The pattern of destructive behaviour is the subject of poet Kimberly Reyes’ piece ‘On Touch’. It is set in Cork where Kimberly - a New York resident - was spending time as a Fulbright scholar. She compares the patterns of yearning for love to an addiction: ‘my Black femaleness in mostly-white surroundings meant that I was romantically under socialized and just plain dumb in dating, always searching for a hit of the touch drug.’
Diarmuid Hester is an Irish writer and an academic based in the UK. He tells a story about how the detailed patterns of tattoos on his body became interwoven with an unlikely friendship with the tattoo artist - a friendship ‘laid down in blood and ink’.