To Fruit (and multiply) 2021

To Fruit (and multiply) 2021 installation in situ at Ballina Arts Centre, Co.Mayo

Detail of To Fruit (and multiply) 2021

Wood, paper, gold wire, glue and mixed media. Forming a site-specific sculptural installation spanning two floor levels of the Ballina Arts Centre’s entrance foyer and gallery. Commissioned by curator Sinéad Keogh for I Am what I Am, a nuanced celebration of queer artists who work with gender, sexuality, identity and queer politics.

‘Fruit!’ shouted after me in the streets of Belfast in the 1980s, meant to insult, to warn that I was recognised and it would get me in trouble. ‘Well spotted!’ I would call back, moving fast, knowing such tactics of resistance might indeed get me bate.

Being spotted as a dyke, noticeably queer in this otherness was my calling, my identity, my pride. I delighted in my active fruit-full-ness, and I was terrified.

Defying gender norms and the wanton wasting of our fertile bodies in unsanctified sexuality was deemed criminal and desolate. Not performing as a good breeder was judged to be a terrible waste of a perfectly functional reproductive system.

Fruit /fruːt/ noun

The sweet fleshy or dry ripened ovary of a flowering plant, enclosing the seed or seeds, can be eaten as food. In these many flowering versions of gender we continue to multiply, ovoided in parentheses, going forth beyond them/their brackets.

Us with our adult sexual organs, and us doing each other with consent, out beyond with all our pleasures and our ambiguous corporeality, our many marginal eXe’s and Y’s lining up for our organs within or without our bodies.