Toma McCullim
Quare Commons

Toma McCullim

Quare Commons

7 August to 14 November 2026

Toma McCullim’s residency, supported by the Crespo Foundation, reflects on and consolidates five years of Salt & Pepper, a social art practice with LGBTQ elders. The residency creates space to gather, think, write, and shape the next phase of the work, focusing on community relation, queer embodied ways of living with land, and the social ecologies queer people have built over time. It traces how the LGBTQ community in West Cork have found home, sustained one another, and grown cultures of art-making rooted in care, presence, and place—an ecology shaped through tending, creativity, and belonging. It asks: what do we want to grow next?

The residency consolidates five years of Salt & Pepper’s social art practice with LGBTQ elders, while actively continuing the work. What began with informal meetings on park benches grew into I’m in Love with Mother Nature, an award-winning participatory film, and later Grá—the Irish word for love—a major exhibition at Uillinn. This residency reflects on that journey while engaging fully with the most recent, environmentally focused phase of the practice.

Taking residence is understood here as i do chomhnaí—dwelling-with. Uillinn becomes a temporary home for Salt & Pepper’s ethos of quare collectivism: a space held open for queer bodies, voices, memory, and experiment. The work understands environment as both ecological and social, reflecting on how this communities has found home, sustained one another, and grown cultures of art-making, rooted in West Cork.

The residency will be active and porous, involving talks, film screenings, play spaces, and moments of gathering. Through making, thinking, and being together, the residency asks how we live ag dul in aois—going into age—and what it means to tend a queer commons within an institutional space.

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 experience, collective process, and care-led methodologies. She is particularly interested in the fundamental question: what does art do? Working across walking, gathering, storytelling, and co-creation, her projects operate as catalysts for connection, reflection, and action, stimulating creative change-making at individual, communal, and ecological levels.

Image: Gra Exhibition Opening, 2025, Photograph by Emma Jervis

https://www.toma-mccullim.com/ https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091911231034 https://www.facebook.com/toma.mccullim

Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre acknowledges the financial support of The Arts Council  / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Crespo Foundation in making this residency possible.

For more background information see westcorkartscentre.com/event/salt-and-pepper/