Marley Starskey Butler
Artist / Researcher / Social Worker

Home

Selected Works

2026
Compensare: For the Swallows We Weigh, Eastside Projects
Yuh Nuh, Vivid Projects  and Birmingham Museum and Gallery

2025
Augenblick

2024 
Thirty-Six, Midlands Arts Centre
Anchors, Hospital Rooms
Oh, So Now You Love Us? Eagleworks
Else, Multistory
Us Done Well EP X Warner and Butler

2023
4am

2021
Lemon Tree 
Thank You Music

2020
Black For Ages 
Tower In Memories

In Progress
Access Subject
Zwischen
Selected Ambient Portraits 2018 - 25

The Archives 2004 - 20 (Coming Soon)

PhD

CV

Articles + Features

Contact

 Instagram

© Rarahdem 2026

. 
Lemon Tree


  
        

​’Lemon Tree is a spiritual successor to a piece called Ruminate released in 2014 from an album called Awake / Night. The questions I was asking back then, the confusion I was trying to unknot, finally unravelled itself. In a way that I now know and understand, including knowing that the work continues but at least I know the task. I’m now, finally, wearing the right shoes to walk forward.  Here?’

Listen: Here

Written Engineered, Produced, and Mixed by Marley Starskey Butler at home. 
Lead Vocal on 'Here' performed by Eleanor Dattani.
Additional Vocal on 'Here' performed by Olivia Onyehara and processed / manipulated through Forrester.
Movement Artist Kim Bormann read through notes from Marley Starskey Butler's psychotherapy notes and based her movement on them. Once she and Marley returned home after the shoot, they peeled and juiced each lemon, dried out the seeds, bottled the juice, and planted the seeds. In the following days, Marley drank hot lemon and ginger until it ran out. It felt like a ritual, and those actions were as much a part of the piece as the piece itself.

The main form of regret
is emotional avoidance.
I came torn and bereft
never waiting with assurance.
A burden of neglect
now at war with its performance.


Directed, Photographed and Edited by Marley Starskey Butler | Movement by Kim Bormann

Here I am now, in delay when I had to say. All ways walk my feet, towards the day. when the night time can only lay Fix myself turn the screw so tightly that i see you.


Directed and Edited by Marley Starskey Butler. River Frome photographed by Lucy Bentham in response to the sound. Lemon Trees grown by the sun, watered, and photographed by Marley Starskey Butler in December 2021, from Lemon pips dried and planted by Kim Bormann and Marley Starskey Butler in September 2021.