The exhibition is entitled 'For the Love of Art', but could as easily be called 'For the Art of Love'. Burton's paintings are not only romantic in their aesthetics, but in their stories. The drama of love, or the lack of it, is played out in Burton's most important works: Slavic ballads of loveless marriages, people actually dying of broken hearts and forbidden romances all take prime place in his work.

Recently I visited an exhibition at the Glucksman Gallery, in the beautiful grounds of University College Cork. It was called Now Wakes the Sea.  Irish and international visual artists had taken on the sea as a theme in their work.  Striking, for me, was the highly charged romantic nature of almost all of the work on show, except for the piece by Tacita Dean. 

As I began the last page in this journal volume, I was walking down the Lisburn Road in Belfast.  I passed a glass & steel 1980s BT telephone box near the City Hospital and like being sucked through a vacuum tube, surged abruptly into surreality. Images, visions, dreams of the past swirled together with the present on this misty Belfast street. I took out my phone and dialled it's number 028 9023 2471, holding my breath waiting for the green amber screen to illuminate and for it to ring

These pages in my notebook are all from early to mid January. It's been a really busy few weeks, between designing & producing the next stage of prototypes for my shawls; preparing for and exhibiting at Showcase 2015; and filming our segment on RTÉ Nationwide, as well as continuing to produce my [award-winning :-)] silk scarves & bow-ties, one each of which were presented to President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins as he opened Showcase, which is Ireland's largest trade-only event.

The Five-Star Westbury Hotel is one of the few institutions whose million euro collection of Irish art can rival that of The Merrion Hotel. 

It's amongst this collection of sublime pieces by Sir John Lavery, Michael Scott, Louis Le Brocquy and other important Irish artists in the Westbury's timelessly elegant open-plan drawing rooms that you can make the best possible first impression on your future mother-in-law by taking her for afternoon tea, looking out over all the goings-ons of Grafton Street. It's somehow both low-key and discretely opulent.

It's been more than two years since 'Drowning in Enough', a vision of the overwhelming sufficiency of grace in the midst of surrender, but it wasn't until after I wove 'Dark Hedges', when I went with some friends to go 'bouldering' in the sea, just a few miles north of that broken tunnel of yew in north County Antrim, that I tasted foamy saltwater, got caught in a current, pulled under, and couldn't catch my breath, that I realised what it really meant to drown.

British designer Alexander McQueen's work explored, mastered and subverted history, culture, craft & fashion. Famous for deeply relatable imagery and for being unafraid of bringing an audience on a dichromatic journey of dark and light, McQueen provoked imaginations, assertively juxtaposing the familiar with the alien.

““You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.””

— Alexander McQueen