Exhibition explores love beyond the human

Fiction, science, and sculpture come together in a major exhibition opening in West Cork this weekend.

‘Love Beyond the Species and the Sexual’ is a new solo exhibition by Cork visual artist, Siobhán McGibbon, opening at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen at 2pm this Saturday.

Running until 19 September, the exhibition presents a chapter of McGibbon’s ongoing long-term project, Xenophon.

Told across three acts, it moves from the artist’s unkempt garden into the ecologies, histories, and “more-than-human” communities of Myross Woods, Leap.

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.

Act 1, entitled ‘Netflix and Disintegrate into Nothing and Everything’, explores the possibilities of multispecies desire and the absurdities of dating culture. Act 2, ‘Love Is Blindly Reaching Out Rhizoids and Anchoring Them to a Rock’, explores how popular culture shapes intimacy and relationships with human and more-than-human lives. 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, biomaterials, 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, ‘Love Beyond the Species and the Sexual’ invites audiences to encounter the woodland as partners in loving acts of merging and decay.

Humorous, tactile, and conceptually rigorous, the exhibition is accompanied by a public engagement programme of talks, sensory events, audio experiences, and accessible tours.

‘Love Beyond the Species and the Sexual’ was 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.