Audio-described and tactile tour with Emilie Conway at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre
Wednesday 9 September 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Free event with limited places, pre-booking is essential
To book, call 02822090 or email info@westcorkartscentre.com
Experience Dr Siobhán McGibbon’s exhibition – Love Beyond the Species and the Sexual – through a tour created and led by visually impaired artist and aesthetic accessibility consultant Emilie Conway. Designed from a blind and low-vision perspective, this tour offers a rich, multisensory, non-visual experience of the speculative world of Xenophon. Through Emilie’s live audio description and spatial guidance, visitors are invited to interact directly with tactile biomaterial sculptures and mycelial webs, feel sculpted forms and scale, and explore custom olfactory scents created with artist Frank Bloem.
About the facilitator
Emilie Conway is an award-winning vocal jazz and multidisciplinary artist, and access consultant. She is the creator of Solid Space Sound – an innovative, multi-sensory approach to making visual art and cultural spaces vibrant, immersive, and fully accessible for blind and visually impaired audiences. Informed by her lived experience with visual impairment, Emilie blends rich verbal audio description with tactile, musical, spatial, and spoken-word elements to bring visual art off the wall and into the senses. An active international vocal jazz artist and composer, Emilie has delivered bespoke sensory and audio-described tours for major cultural institutions, including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), The Ark, the Irish Architecture Foundation, and the Project Arts Centre.
Alongside her artistic and access practice, Emilie is an accredited Art Psychotherapist (IACP). Emilie also founded DADA (Disabled Artists, Disabled Academics), advocating nationally and internationally for equity, disability rights, and access across the arts.
Love Beyond the Species and the Sexual
Love beyond the species and the sexual is a major solo exhibition by Siobhán McGibbon at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre. The exhibition presents a chapter of McGibbon’s ongoing speculative world, Xenophon, a long-term project that imagines more-than-human futures through fiction, science and sculpture. Told across three acts, it moves from the artist’s unkempt garden into the ecologies, histories and more-than-human communities of Myross Woods, Leap, Co. Cork. Read more about the exhibition here.
The development of this work has been supported by several residencies at Uillinn in recent years, each one contributing meaningfully to Siobhán’s research, collaborative practice, and the development of her unique visual language.
Supported by an Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon Project Award. Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre acknowledges the financial support of The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon in making exhibitions possible.
Image description: A photograph in a gallery setting shows a person with arm reaching up, looking up at a cylindrical pale yellow and brown sculpture suspended from the ceiling; a bright light shines through the cylinder.