Ancestral Biology, 2025

Custom House Gallery, Westport, Co. Mayo, Ireland

18 September - 12 October 2025

This exhibition explores 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.

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.

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.

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.

Together, the artists have created a plant exchange: a participatory archive where visitors can trade plants and stories. These living specimens, each with a personal history, become part of the exhibition—further blurring the line between artefact and organism. Referencing the aesthetics of libraries and archives, the space honours gardens as sites of knowledge, learning and care.

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.

Audio description is available for this exhibition.