Strange Forms

~ rewild yourself ~

About

Oh, it’s you! Excellent. Delighted to meet you. I’m Léan Ní Chuilleanáin, custodian of Strange Forms.

Creativity is at the centre of my life. As well as scratching my personal creative itches every single day, I read and study everything I can about how and why we make art. I write about all this and more on the blog, and my mission is to spread the creative joy as far as I possibly can.

Because, you know, creativity matters. Not being able to express yourself creatively is miserable – so if you aren’t making what you want to be making, hear this: you deserve better, and so does everyone in your life. Please remember, if you are human (which I’d like to think is fairly probable), then creative expression is your birthright.

Imagine if everybody tapped into that! Imagine if we all found our own unique creative groove and made our work as a matter of priority, and as a matter of course. That’s a rich, complex, joy-nourished world I’d like to live in.

Sherlock Holmes said, “Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

[Yes, beautiful pedants, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really, in the 1893 short story “The Greek Interpreter”. You’re welcome. I love you too.]

What this means: Your work is not my work. Your work is not their work. Your work may be unlike anything we’ve seen before – or it may be a subtle variation on a tried and tested theme. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, I really want it to exist in the world, and my purpose here is to help that happen.

The illustrations on this site

…are by my son, Fiachra Murphy, who is very strongly tuned in to his personal creative channel.

More about me, in case you’re curious

…or procrastinating. No judgement here.

First off, if you saw my name and were all, “L… what now?”, don’t worry, I wrote you a little pronunciation guide.

I live in Dublin (original flavour) with my techie/poet/photographer hozzband and – in my highly biased opinion – the world’s two most fabulous children. I’m an introverted, ambidextrous, queer, autistic, leftie, faintly pagan agnostic with no intention whatsoever of curbing my creative ambitions or focusing on a sensible range of projects. The art in my blood can take whatever strange forms it likes, thanks.

As they say, it isn’t off the stones I licked it. In my family, you can’t lob a brick without hitting an artist of some kind. (Not that you want to throw bricks at my family. Let’s agree to call it an accident.) Writing, music, visual art, performance – whichever way you look, the creative life is front and centre. I started making art the way every small human does, and I’ve never entirely stopped.

Words

Between one thing and another, I’m a fifth-generation author. I started writing stories when I was six, went pro (in my mind!) soon afterwards, and began publishing in my mid-teens. While at school, I won several national awards for fiction and poetry in English and Irish, and at university I combined a literature and language degree with an ongoing study of writing.

I taught my first creative writing class when I was 15, founded and ran a school literary magazine at 16, did a Master’s in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin after my degree, and more recently took a certificate class in Teaching Creativity at Dublin City University. I’ve taught at the Irish Writers’ Centre, where I work with beginning novelists as part of their mentorship programme.

In 2014, Atlantic Books of London published my first novel, The Living (under the super-secret pen-name Léan Cullinan). Several more novels are under construction as we speak, and I’m looking at various options for publishing them.

Being a card-carrying wordo, I’ve also done professional tech writing, editing, and translation in my time.

Textiles and visual art

My grandmother taught me to knit, crochet, and cross-stitch some time around 1980, and I learned Irish crochet lace a few years later from an ancient nun who hung out on the reception desk at my mother’s workplace.

Later, I taught myself dressmaking, surface embroidery, and quiltmaking, starting from my great-aunts’ musty collection of wartime pamphlets, some screamingly 1970s craft magazines, and several bags of fabric scraps. (Pre-Web, petals, this was how we lived.) Textile art excites the hell out of me.

I have City & Guilds certificates in embroidery and in patchwork & quilting. Technically, I’m an internationally exhibited quilt artist. My first attempt at an online business was in the textile craft space: I sold custom embroideries and patterns, and did some teaching, but eventually I decided that it wasn’t the right business for me.

Besides the stringy stuff, I draw and paint occasionally – usually in a frenzy for a week or two and then nothing for ages. (Familiar?)

Performance

When I was five, the Irish-language radio station visited my school, and I got to sing a song about daisies, all by myself, standing on a stage in my best party dress. (It was the perfect dress for radio.) By that point I already had several years of experience under my small belt, unnerving the adults around me with my spirited renditions of Latin hymns, Italian Communist anthems, and nineteenth-century Irish rebel songs. (My parents have a lot to answer for.) At heart, I am, and always have been, a performing flea.

Growing up I studied recorder, piano, and violin, and I taught myself guitar – which I’m pretty terrible at – but my chief musical love is singing. I’ve sung solo and in choirs all my life, including the Irish, European, and World Youth Choirs (back when I had the youth for it), and I’ve participated in studio recordings both in choirs and as a backing singer. I’ve done a little bit of singer-songwriting, too, which would have gone better if I’d practised my guitar more.

I’ve been a paid member of several church choirs (on the Faintly Pagan Agnostic Infiltration Programme … which doesn’t exist, obviously. Or does it?), and since 1998 I’ve sung with one of Ireland’s top chamber choirs, the Mornington Singers. My o’erweening ambitions include doing more solo work, taking an acting class (I haven’t done any acting since I played the title role in my all-girls-school production of Hamlet), and trying standup comedy where other people can actually hear me.

Thanks for visiting Strange Forms!

Depending on what you need today, I encourage you to

I’m very happy you’re here, and I look forward to seeing you around.