Toma McCullim

Toma has a 1st class BA (hons) Degree in Anthropology of Art from the University of East Anglia and has an MA in Arts Process from the Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork.  Her work has been shown nationally and internationally.

Presently Toma holds an Arts Council Research Bursary which explores feminist spaciality, queer temporality, and radical archival practices through site-responsive, community-engaged art making. THIS IS MY STORY was developed during a 3 month residency at Uillinn West Cork Art Centre in 2024. The residency asks How can we create a living feminist archive—one that resists the rigidities of institutional memory and instead embraces the unruly, affective, and embodied knowledge of lesbian lives?

THIS IS MY STORY explores the bad archive, the queer archive, where gossip, desire, and insurgent storytelling become acts of cultural reproduction. Within this shared space, we make and remake our histories—not as fixed records, but as fluid, lived experiences that shape lesbian identity and community. In the intimacy of the recreated bender, we engage in society-making beyond the patriarchal order, crafting alternative structures that sustain us, politically, erotically, and creatively. How do these spaces generate not only resistance but new ways of being, remembering, and imagining?

In 2023 Toma received the Cork County Council Artist Residency Bursary for her work BENDER, an intersectional residency which explored Toma's experience of living outside in a tent structure while living as part of the Greenham Common Women's anti nuclear protests with Travellers who also had lived in these type of structures.

https://www.westcorkartscentre.com/toma-mccullim-cork-county-council

Toma calls herself an 'Artivist' that is an activist artist. Her work is powered by a strong belief in social justice and environmental ecology. Her participatory practice empowers her collaborators in the amplification of their own authentic voice. As an anthropologist of art she is most interested in the fundamental question 'What does art do ?' Her work stimulates a call to action for creative change making.

She was Business to Arts Artist in Residence in Skibbereen’s Ludgate Hub working on Calling Home . 2019-20.