The   Mapping Climate Change exhibition celebrates UCC's commitment to Sustainability and Community Engagement through local and international textile art works from Ireland and the US. This exhibition unites for the first time two innovative textile art projects that give visual and tangible presence to our warming world at a crucial moment of environmental precarity. By translating temperature, precipitation, humidity or windspeed data into stitch and colour, these vibrant works potently and poignantly reveal the centrality of weather to identity and the experiences of place and thus "map" a range of encounters from environmental to phenomenological in the magnificent space of a former railway warehouse in Horgan's Quay. 

This exhibition especially celebrates the 20th anniversary of   The Knitting Map, which was commissioned in 2005 as one of the flagship projects of Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture. Ambitious and visionary, this large-scale textile installation was made collaboratively with more than 2000 older, working-class women from Cork’s North side and knitted every day for a year. Weather station data was programmed to generate yarn colour and movement to generate complexity of stitch. The work is an abstract cartography of weather data and urban movement in Cork City over a calendar year.

Like the natural world and our place in it, textiles can be both vulnerable and resilient. Produced more than a decade apart.   The Knitting Map and   The Tempestry Project recount evolving stories of climate awareness. In conversation   The Knitting Map and   The Tempestry Project integrate science and art, technology and handwork and authorship and collaboration to visualise a developing public consciousness of environmental justice issues. 

This exhibition gratefully acknowledges sponsorship from Clarendon Properties, and is also supported by Research Ireland and UCC (UCC Creative, Sustainability Institute, Sustainability Office, Arts & Culture Office, CACSSS Research Fund & Dept of Theatre). 

The   Mapping Climate Change exhibition was curated by Dr. Deborah Barkun and toured the US from 2021 - 24 (Berman Museum of Art, Pennsylvania 2021; Kohler Gallery, Wisconsin 2023; The Art Museum, West Virginia 2024) supported by Culture Ireland. 

Exhibition Open
FREE