Salt & Pepper

Toma McCullim
Salt & Pepper 2026
ag siúl ar bhealach cam

Meeting Last Friday of the Month the Golden Hour before Sunset. May till October.

Salt & Pepper, by Toma McCullim, is a queer, quare series of monthly gatherings for LGBTQ elders. This year we will be – ag siúl ar bhealach cam — walking a crooked path. Meeting on the last Friday of each month, one hour before sunset, we move with the golden light into dusk, gathering across West Cork in boreens, hedgerows, shorelines, graveyards, and other liminal places. This is a travelling project shaped by walking, listening, singing, making, and remembering together. Growing rhizomatically from place to place, Salt & Pepper invites those who love the sideways and the byways to co-create art through shared presence, care, and connection.

This year artist Toma McCullim returns with Salt & Pepper, It centres LGBTQ elders and queer kin as holders of ecological knowledge and lived experience, and understands landscape as a living, active presence. We gather as a form of queer, quare climate justice activism, rooted in Irish ways of thinking about land, water, time, and relation.

Salt & Pepper unfolds as a series of monthly gatherings and journeys across West Cork, meeting on the last Friday of each month one hour before sunset and moving with the light into dusk. These tairseach moments—thresholds—invite a shift in attention. Water is central to the work: rivers, marshes, rain, tides, wells, and the water held in bodies are treated as living entities with memory, agency, and rights. Land, trees, weather, and elements are approached as queer kin—resilient, changeable, resistant to control.

In the cadence of Irish thought, we are always in motion. We are ag dul in aois—going into age—changing together through shared time. We do not own land or water; we are i do chomhnaí with them, dwelling-with, responsible to what sustains us. Irish and English move together, naming states of becoming rather than fixed identities—ag éirí, ag fanacht, ag athrú.

We gather as a collective queer body in the landscape. It is embodied, somatic, and relational, unfolding through walking, listening, making, remembering, and staying with place. What forms is a temporary queer commons: earthy, attentive, political, and porous, where climate justice is practised through presence, care, and ongoing relationship with water, land, and one another—ag siúl ar bhealach cam, walking a crooked path together.

Toma McCullim is an artist who describes herself as an Artivist—an activist artist. Her work is driven by a deep commitment to social justice and environmental ecology, and centres on participatory practices that empower collaborators to amplify their own authentic voices. Trained as an anthropologist of art, Toma’s practice is grounded in lived queer experience, collective process, and care-led methodologies. She is particularly interested in the fundamental question: what does art do? Working across film, storytelling, and co-creation, her projects operate as catalysts for connection, reflection, and action, stimulating creative change-making at individual, communal, and ecological levels.

This version of Salt & Pepper is funded by the HSE and Arts for Health Partnership Programme. 

Toma McCullim
Salt & Pepper 2025
6 August to 13 September 2025

Join Toma McCullim and the Salt & Pepper collective for an inspiring residency exploring love in all its forms through the Crawford Art Gallery’s Collection. Working with Michael Waldron, Curator of Collections & Special Projects at the Crawford, participants delved into over 3,000 artworks to curate Grá, the current exhibition at Uillinn, celebrating love—of place, country, colour, ideas, family, and romance. This collaborative residency invites older LGBTQ+ individuals to engage and create art work inspired by chosen pieces, fostering connection and creativity. Grá is a vibrant, inclusive celebration of diverse perspectives on love and art.

This residency is supported by the Crespo Foundation

Image above: Toma McCullim at Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre for the launch of Grá. Image by Emma Jervis Photography

Salt & Pepper 2024
Weekly in the Workspace

The Crawford Gallery of Art in Cork will be closing soon for a major refurbishment and its Collection will go into storage. With the help of Michael Waldron, Crawford’s Assistant Curator of Collections & Special Projects, we have the opportunity to select works from Crawford’s Collection of over 3,000+ artworks and build an exhibition for Uillinn for 2025. The show will be called  Grá and will celebrate love in all its forms.  Our Salt & Pepper people will explore the Collection to bring their favourite pieces together to create a broad, diverse and inclusive exhibition for Uillinn. We will also be working on some art works of our own that will speak to those we have chosen.

Toma explains, “our group is called Salt & Pepper because we are at the time of life when our hair is starting to speckle but we are also the essential spice of life! If you identify as an older Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Trans, or a sprinkle of all those terms and a shake of others, you can contact Uillinn to find out more.”

“This is a fantastic opportunity” says Ann Davoren, Director of Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre “to bring two public institutions – the Crawford and Uillinn, together with the Salt & Pepper group, ably mentored and supported in this wonderful project by artist Toma McCullim and curator Michael Waldron. I’m really looking forward to seeing the result of their exploration and the exhibition that will be created from that for Uillinn in 2025.”

Image above: Salt & Pepper at the Crawford Art Gallery, image by Jackie Nevin

Toma McCullim
Salt & Pepper 2023
1 May to 13 May 2023

Salt & Pepper returns for a second year with artist Toma McCullim as creative producer, ’Salt and Pepper because we are at the time of life when our hair is starting to speckle but we are also the essential spice of life!’ the project invites older people who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Trans or a sprinkle of all those terms and shake of others to weekly sessions or studio drop in 2 to 13 May to create together and document an important moment in time for our older and rural LGBTQ+ community; reflecting on past and present challenges and celebrate older rainbow generation commonality and achievements.

‘Bealtaine Festival celebrates the arts and creativity as we age,’ as Toma describes,‘ this is time to show up and shine. Salt and Pepper collective, this May, will be creating a participative film together. We will be weaving story and image with sound from our multi points of view to tell a tale of belonging. We will be playing the fool, acting up, and coming out with all sorts.’

As part of the project dance artist Andrew Coombs (UK) and filmmaker Julie Ballands will facilitate sessions in movement and filmmaking respectively, sharing both skills and getting involved in the collective explorations. There will also be a soundscape session with Carole Nelson (dates to be arranged) Tuesday 2nd and Tuesday 9th May at 7.30pm to 9.30pm there will be performance and film screening at Uillinn.

If this project sounds like it might resonate with you and you’d like to get involved, drop us an email at saltandpepper@westcorkartscentre.com or call 02822090

Toma McCullim is an ‘artivist’- an activist artist. Her work is powered by a strong belief in social justice and environmental ecology. Her participatory practice empowers her collaborators in the amplification of their own authentic voice. As an anthropologist of art, she is interested in the fundamental question: ‘What does art do?’ Her work stimulates a call to action for creative change making. Toma has a 1st class BA (hons) Degree in Anthropology of Art from the University of East Anglia and has an MA in Arts Process from the Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork.

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Salt & Pepper 2022
Exhibition: Stairway and Link Galleries
12 July to 10 September 2022

Salt and Pepper is a group of LGBTQ+ elders who met on the park benches of west Cork for the month of May. In June we brought the collected stories into the workshop at Uillinn to create this exhibition. Artist Toma McCullim worked with her peers to create collective artworks which muse on our life journeys. The willow tree will bow but not break talks about acts of memorial. The red ribbons remind us of the tragic toll of AIDS took. Now hung on the tree in the Irish folk tradition they represent rituals of healing. This is the map started from a conversation about the young us that had no idea of what life would have in store as we grew older. I was the only lesbian I knew. There was no map…only... ‘beyond here be monsters’.

Image: Salt & Pepper, image by Toma McCullim, 2022

The Salt & Pepper Collective is funded 2022 to 2025 by the Health Service Executive, South West Region, Community Work Department.