DR. SIOBHAN MCGIBBON
Siobhan McGibbon is an Irish visual artist, researcher, and World-builder with a trans-disciplinary practice. Her expression mutates, merging sculpture, animation, drawing, permaculture and participatory installations.
Xenophon is a long-term, trans-disciplinary speculative world-building art project created by visual artist Dr. Siobhan McGibbon. It uses sculpture, narrative, animation and science to imagine post-Anthropocene futures, bio-ethics and multi-species relationships.
McGibbon has a special interest in collaborative, trans-disciplinary storytelling, collaborating with practitioners in diverging fields to build the world narrative. Collaborative enquiries include a 5-year collaboration with writer Maeve O’Lynn developing Xenothorpian culture, working with CURAM, the centre for research in medical devices, and REMEDI, the regenerative medicine institute, to imagine the origin of species. Current collaborations include olfactory artist Frank Bloem, intimacy coach Grace Alice O’Shea, mycelium artist Catherine Euale, sound artist Billy Kemp and disability activist consultant and multi-sensory artist Emilie Conway.
The world unfolds with each body of work or ‘chapter ’. Each chapter manifests through experimental enquiries with traditional and cutting-edge techniques to create multi-layered scenarios. Xenophon is activated in multiple contexts: galleries, labs, site-specific interventions, and virtual archives.
The world of Xenophon is a critical framework for conducting multispecies research through a speculative, science-fictional lens. This alter-imaginary is populated by Xenothorpians, a fluid species that commune, mutate and merge with living and non-living entities to adapt to the Anthropocene. Their hybridisations provide a backdrop from which new stories emerge, offering a satirical approach to the problem of humans and a lens through which to query the possibilities of multispecies futures. The world continues to unfold and inform McGibbon’s output. Each new body of work functions as a progressive contribution to the narrative.
The stories that build Xenophon are integral to this world-building practice. To gather these stories, McGibbon locates herself within a conjuncture of events, laboratories, ideas, things, people, collaborations, plants, animals, cells and technologies. The project draws on the work of thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers to examine the critical and conceptual possibilities of expanded agency and multi-species worlding.
Critical to this world-building practice is the question of what happens when one decentres the human. How does this shift in focus bring other perspectives into view, and what new modes of research, collaboration, creative production and emotional experience become possible as a result? What other worlds can we world?
Xenophon is activated in multiple contexts: galleries, labs, gardens, and site-specific and virtual interventions. Including; Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre (2026), CCA, Derry (2025), Pallas, Dublin (2024), Mediamatic Amsterdam (2024), Galway Arts Centre (2023), Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2021), Sirius Arts Centre (2019), Triskel Arts Centre (2018), The Science Gallery (2017), TULCA (2017), The LAB (2017), Millennium Court Arts Centre (2016) and Galway city museum (2015).
McGibbon holds a PhD from the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS, 2020) and a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) from Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT, 2009).
For enquiries, please contact [email protected]
Siobhan McGibbon is an Irish visual artist, researcher, and World-builder with a trans-disciplinary practice. Her expression mutates, merging sculpture, animation, drawing, permaculture and participatory installations.
Xenophon is a long-term, trans-disciplinary speculative world-building art project created by visual artist Dr. Siobhan McGibbon. It uses sculpture, narrative, animation and science to imagine post-Anthropocene futures, bio-ethics and multi-species relationships.
McGibbon has a special interest in collaborative, trans-disciplinary storytelling, collaborating with practitioners in diverging fields to build the world narrative. Collaborative enquiries include a 5-year collaboration with writer Maeve O’Lynn developing Xenothorpian culture, working with CURAM, the centre for research in medical devices, and REMEDI, the regenerative medicine institute, to imagine the origin of species. Current collaborations include olfactory artist Frank Bloem, intimacy coach Grace Alice O’Shea, mycelium artist Catherine Euale, sound artist Billy Kemp and disability activist consultant and multi-sensory artist Emilie Conway.
The world unfolds with each body of work or ‘chapter ’. Each chapter manifests through experimental enquiries with traditional and cutting-edge techniques to create multi-layered scenarios. Xenophon is activated in multiple contexts: galleries, labs, site-specific interventions, and virtual archives.
The world of Xenophon is a critical framework for conducting multispecies research through a speculative, science-fictional lens. This alter-imaginary is populated by Xenothorpians, a fluid species that commune, mutate and merge with living and non-living entities to adapt to the Anthropocene. Their hybridisations provide a backdrop from which new stories emerge, offering a satirical approach to the problem of humans and a lens through which to query the possibilities of multispecies futures. The world continues to unfold and inform McGibbon’s output. Each new body of work functions as a progressive contribution to the narrative.
The stories that build Xenophon are integral to this world-building practice. To gather these stories, McGibbon locates herself within a conjuncture of events, laboratories, ideas, things, people, collaborations, plants, animals, cells and technologies. The project draws on the work of thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers to examine the critical and conceptual possibilities of expanded agency and multi-species worlding.
Critical to this world-building practice is the question of what happens when one decentres the human. How does this shift in focus bring other perspectives into view, and what new modes of research, collaboration, creative production and emotional experience become possible as a result? What other worlds can we world?
Xenophon is activated in multiple contexts: galleries, labs, gardens, and site-specific and virtual interventions. Including; Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre (2026), CCA, Derry (2025), Pallas, Dublin (2024), Mediamatic Amsterdam (2024), Galway Arts Centre (2023), Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2021), Sirius Arts Centre (2019), Triskel Arts Centre (2018), The Science Gallery (2017), TULCA (2017), The LAB (2017), Millennium Court Arts Centre (2016) and Galway city museum (2015).
McGibbon holds a PhD from the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS, 2020) and a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) from Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT, 2009).
For enquiries, please contact [email protected]
