Monday 5 January 2026, evening

2025 in review

Happy new year folks! Inspired by Gina and bcj, here's some stuff I did this year, roughly one thing per month.

January

me standing in front of a room full of Japanese people and also a weird robot

At the end of January I went to Tokyo with Rachel to visit CCBT and do some teaching as part of their Future Ideations Camp. This was really fun! Lots of great people, interesting projects, nobody complained too much when I tried to speak my terrible Japanese at them.

February

me standing in front of a bunch of torii at the Fushimi Inari shrine

After the end of the camp, I stayed on in Japan as a tourist for another two weeks. I went to Kyoto (beautiful but full of Australian tourists), Nara, Osaka, Nikko, and then back to Tokyo for a few days at the end. I used to do a lot of solo travelling, but this was the first trip I've been on my own for nearly a decade. It was great, and I'm itching to go back, but next time I'd definitely like to have a travelling companion.

March

a godforsaken mess of plumbing and speaker cabling

After getting back from Japan, I dove straight into supporting our Winter Residency artists with their projects. Nat and Geraint were both great, and I got to expand my creative technology skillset into the exciting world of "art plumbing".

April

Work-wise, April was a month that I mostly spent on the management side of my job — we had one person leaving my team, and another returning from maternity leave, so there was a lot of transition to be managed. Over the last few years, management has become a much bigger part of my job. While it's very rewarding, it's not something that often produces big flashy moments of success, so I wanted to acknowledge it here.

May

a chunky plastic gizmo in bright primary colours

A good chunk of my May was spent on my project for Mayke, a manga translation device. This was great, love to build a little gizmo just for me.

June

a hot air balloon flying incredibly low over a residential street

I don't think I did anything particularly exciting in June, but I did nab this ridiculous photo of a hot air balloon coming in low over my street.

July

As a Bectu rep, I was part of the team that helped Watershed to sign up to the Bristol Apartheid Free Zone and a boycott of Israeli products. For a charity in the UK, especially in an uncertain funding climate, this kind of activism is really difficult, and I'm incredibly proud that we managed to make it happen.

August

a creepy figure made out of a balloon and hugging a beer bottle

Every August, Tony and I run our annual Make Shift Camp, an intensive week-long creative camp for young people working with art and technology. As always it was delightful, inspiring, and maybe a little too intense. Afterwards I went to France and sat in the shade reading a book and drinking rosé and avoided speaking to anyone for several days, which was great.

September

I got promoted! Or at least my job got renamed. I'm now Head of Studio, which is both fancier-sounding and easier to understand than the old title (Studio Community Lead). I do now get a ton of LinkedIn invites from people who think I run an ad agency though.

October

a blue-lit wall of robot-drawn portraits

As part of Playable City Osaka, I ran the Bristol side of a simultaneous installation of Kaleider's Portrait Without Borders, a robotic drawing artwork. I spend so much time working on early stage projects, so it was really great to get back onto the exhibition side for a little while, putting things in front of a public audience. Also a big shout-out to Terence for helping me babysit the slightly temperamental robots for a few days.

November

I feel like I spent the entirety of November holding interviews for various residencies and projects. Interviews are great, you get to meet loads of interesting people and hear about their cool ideas. Also, because the interviews were online, I was able to do a bunch of them remotely from my parents' house in Ireland, which meant I could hang out with my family a bit more than I usually can. This year that mostly meant helping my sister's youth theatre company with some projection effects.

December

I got taken out by the seasonal flu that's been going around in early December, and had only just about recovered in time for the Christmas break. What I did manage to do though was make tiramisu for the first time. Did you know you can just make tiramisu, and then you'll have more tiramisu than you can possibly eat? It's genius. Anyway, top tiramisu tips:

Add a little bit of kirsch to your coffee marinade
Don't overwhip your custard before you add the mascarpone, or the whole thing will collapse when you try to mix it in
If you can at all avoid grating the chocolate yourself, do

2026

So yeah, new year, right. I'm not that big a maker of resolutions, although this year I've taken the opportunity to cancel my Spotify subscription, on account of them being ethically terrible. I'd say I'd like to write more, but I say that every year, so no big promises.

Also, I hadn't really noticed until I wrote it all down, but most of my big stuff from the last year has been work-related, which is great and all, but maybe it would be nice to be a bit less work-centric? Ask me again in a year how that's been going.

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