Love beyond the species and the sexual is a major solo exhibition by Siobhán McGibbon at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. The exhibition presents a chapter of McGibbon’s ongoing speculative world, Xenophon, a long-term project that imagines more-than-human futures through fiction, science and sculpture. Told across three acts, it moves from the artist’s unkempt garden into the ecologies, histories and more-than-human communities of Myross Woods.
Developed through collaborations and mentorships with Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, olfactory artist Frank Bloem, intimacy coach Grace Alice O’Shea, mycelium artist Catherine Eugale, sound artist Billy Kemp and disability activist consultant and multi-sensory artist Emilie Conway, the exhibition proposes new forms of sensory and material storytelling. McGibbon develops a queer multi-species romance that considers what it might mean to love beyond the human and the sexual. The project proposes weeds, fungal networks, insects, the endangered Killarney fern, invasive plants and woodland processes as active participants in forms of desire, care and relation.
The exhibition’s final act, Decomposition is Devotion and the Land Longs for You, expands these ideas through the processes of compost, rot and decomposition. Through sculpture, scent, sound, mycelium, bio-materials and participatory installation, McGibbon imagines decomposition as a love language: a slow, sensory and material form of intimacy shaped by seepage, exchange, absorption, transformation and return.
Taking the form of a speculative multi-species relationship counselling session, the exhibition invites audiences to encounter the woodland as partners in loving acts of merging and decay. Humorous, tactile and conceptually rigorous, Love beyond the species and the sexual is accompanied by a public engagement programme of talks, sensory events, audio experiences and accessible tours.
Opening Event
The opening event will take place at Uillinn on Saturday 25 July at 2.00pm with guest speaker Dr. Sarah Kelleher. All welcome!