Siobhán McGibbon and Catherine Euale - Artist's Talk

Siobhán McGibbon and Catherine Euale
Fungal Matters: Mycelium in Ecology, Materials, and More-than-Human Design
Friday 31 July at 1.30pm in the Bollinger Family Space, Level 3
Skibbereen Arts Festival Event at Uillinn

Artist’s Talk
Bio-artist Catherine Euale will introduce audiences to her practice and explore mycelium as a material, discussing its ecological significance, cultivation and artistic applications. Catherine has mentored artist Siobhán McGibbon in the development of the mycelium-based elements of Love Beyond the Species and the Sexual.

Fungi are ancient world-builders. Long before the first forests stood, mycelium was breaking down rock into soil, connecting plant roots across vast underground networks, and cycling nutrients through ecosystems in ways that made complex life on land possible. They decompose the dead into the living, fruit into food and medicine, and remain, to this day, some of the most sophisticated biological engineers on the planet.

In this talk, Catherine Euale Montilla invites you into the world of fungal mycelium: what it is, how it works, and why it is reshaping how we think about materials, design, and our place in the living world. Drawing on her practice as a bio-artist, science communicator and co-author of the forthcoming Fungal Matters for Bio-Based Design (Routledge), Catherine explores the ecological roles of fungi and the growing field of mycelium-based biomaterials. This is an invitation to encounter the living world in a different context, starting from the ground beneath your feet.