Ancestral Biology
By Emma Bourke and Fiona Byrne
At the Custom House Gallery, Westport
18 September to 12 October 2025
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Exploring the informal transmission of plant knowledge through the exchange of cuttings, seeds, and slips. These acts of sharing, rooted in care and community, mirror the ways craft knowledge is passed on: through touch, repetition, and relationship. Both are embodied traditions, often preserved outside written records, and frequently carried out by women. By focusing on these living forms of inheritance, the exhibition highlights how tending, making, and exchanging are deeply interwoven practices that sustain both culture and ecology.
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Glass, a shared material of deep significance to Bourke and Byrne, features prominently in the exhibition. Drawing on its historic role in horticulture and natural history, it becomes a medium for both preservation and storytelling.
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As part of the exhibition we provided Audio Description accessed through a QR code in the space, braille of exhibition texts, a touch box of samples of exhibition materials and a Know Before You Go document.
Bourke’s sculptural glassworks reflect on ethnobotany and the medicinal uses of wild plants. Her series ‘Mithridate’ considers the role of tea in Irish culture as both ritual and remedy. Delicate glass tea strainers encapsulate healing native plants like dandelion, accompanied by botanical drawings and archival research—together forming a living archive of rural plant wisdom.
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Byrne’s works ‘Family’ and ‘Order’ parallel craft knowledge and ecological connection. Through material engagement, she explores how corporeal reconnection can foster empathy with the environment, creating porous boundaries between bodies, place and objects.
The exhibition invites us to reflect on the intimate, often invisible interdependencies that bind us within a fragile ecosystem. It is a call for empathy in the face of an environmental crisis, a reminder that human and more-than-human futures are deeply entwined.