Grá
Uillinn, Skibbereen, Co Cork
★★★★☆
While Crawford Art Gallery, in Cork, is closed for redevelopment – it’s expected to reopen in 2027 – what to do with its thousands of artworks? The solution has been to lend pieces to galleries and museums across Ireland.
Rightly treating the Crawford collection as a piggy bank to be raided, Uillinn, aka West Cork Arts Centre, has teamed up with the local Salt & Pepper group and with the Crawford curator Michael Waldron to devise Grá, a group exhibition that “celebrates love in all its forms”.
Salt & Pepper is an LGBTQ+ creative collective of older individuals – the name refers to its members’ greying hair – that was founded by Toma McCullim in 2022. The group began meeting on park benches during the Covid pandemic; these impromptu gatherings led to more formal collaborative activity, which in turn resulted in a series of artworks shown at Uillinn in 2022 during the Bealtaine Festival.
Grá circles around themes of queer identity and romance. In the first room, for example, we are welcomed by an alabaster-white plaster model and a surreal portrait of a quiescent figure.
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The sculpture is not attributed to an artist; it was produced in the mid-19th century as an educational prop, and although it’s supposed to depict Aphrodite, it may in fact be a likeness of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet whose name has become synonymous with lesbian desire. The portrait, by Stephen Doyle, is called Meditating Tongqi; its subjects are the Chinese phenomena of tongqi, or women who have married gay men, and tongfu, or men who have married gay women, because they felt immense social pressure to conform.
In addition to the works explicitly coded as queer, the curatorial team have clearly enjoyed drawing out connections among other artworks – links framed less as definitive statements than as interpretive, playful gestures, often established through witty juxtapositions or wry sideways glances. The rainbow hues in the works of Tom Climent and Isabel Nolan, for example – otherwise formally and conceptually distinct – serve as suggestive nods to the international symbolism of LGBTQ+ identity.
Grá runs at Uillinn, Skibbereen, Co Cork, until Saturday, September 20th
