llewyn "llE" máire (they/ sí)
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is a chef, artist, community herbalist, and educator.
They are currently the primary facilitator and maker for Savage Craic Apothecary and Mushrooms & Roses.
Their lineage with cooking and community care starts at home with lessons from their mother, Laura Matthiessen, who raised them with domestic medicine, an ethic rooted in land relationship, and the skills to prepare food for shared nourishment.
Laura's guidance wove together the importance of land work and the desire to develop deep relationships with our more-than-human comrades, as well as, the necessity of ongoing abolitionist political activism that builds queer resilience as a tool for resistance.
This led to llE spending decades in community care networks, professional kitchens, and radical collectives; from social work to land work, Food Not Bombs to fine dining — where llE cultivated a passion for fermentation, health autonomy, disability justice, and food as medicine.
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Their medicine draws from classical (Greco-Arabic), as well as, Gaelic, Cymry and other folk herbalism while being rooted in gentle spaces, harm reduction, the sciences and aos sídhe.
While being profoundly influenced by a deep passion for books, llE also studies and practices radical medicine and cooking as an embodied, lifelong process that requires learning in direct collaboration with our flora, funga, fauna, and microbial kin.
In addition to the land and their mother, sí is also honored to name among their teachers; Janet Kent, Dave Meesters, and Jen Stovall (Terra Sylva School of Botanical Medicine), Amanda David (The Peoples Medicine School), Lorna Mauney-Brodek (Herbalista Free School), Nicole Rose (Solidarity Apothecary), and collaborators/ comrades in Irish emergent tradition Tara Mairin agus Tara Baoth Mooney.
llE is also a certified NADA practitioner through NADA Éireann
and active in the Queer Sheds Network and the Black Flag Herbal Clinic.
They have an ongoing ritual a/v art project called themlyn / sardonik grin, that utilises collaborative interfaces with fungi and flora, foraged sound and images, vocal tones and ocular textures, with experimental and traditional instrumentation — brewing sonic ecologies.
