Cockroaches & Consciousness at Fireseed Arts
1 Birth (postcard by David Shrigley)
‘Birth’ holds the tension of beginnings—the mess, the fear, the rupture that precedes form. By pairing tenderness with grit, the piece reminds us that creation is communal even when it feels solitary. Help arrives as presence, not perfection.
2 Pillow Talk
This scene frames sex as dialogue—touch paired with truth-telling, consent, and repair. In the soft afterglow, confessions land without defense, and the body becomes a place where honesty can be heard. The piece suggests that intimacy heals not by perfection but by speaking and staying.
3 Let’s Try Anal
This piece treats sex as a site of repair, where curiosity, consent, and language loosen the knots tied by shame. By centering a taboo, it asks viewers to notice how conditioning narrows desire, and how speaking plainly can turn embarrassment into intimacy.
4 Fantasy Clinic
Fusing medicine, kink, and somatics this piece questions who defines healing and whose body gets believed. It borrows from stories of women linking throat tightness to silence and shame, recasting “treatment” as consent-based practice that reunites voice, pleasure, and power. The work does not claim a cure. It asks viewers to consider how culture medicalizes women’s bodies, how authority polices desire, and how agency changes the prognosis.
5 Menopause
This piece frames menopause as a threshold where the unsaid refuses containment. What once hid in the shadow surfaces as voice, boundary, and heat. By staging this reckoning inside a gallery, the piece asks us to witness the shift from pleasing to speaking, from compliance to self-authority.
6 Dinner Conversation
This piece treats anal play as a conscious practice rather than a joke or taboo. It points to what makes it healing: informed consent, attunement, breath, and clear language about pace, pressure, and boundaries. By moving a private topic into everyday conversation, the work swaps secrecy for skill and shows how honesty can turn shame into connection.
7 At the Dildo Shop
At the Dildo Shop treats desire as ordinary and customizable, not secret or suspect. By giving the marketplace of pleasure a bright, open stage, the piece invites viewers to trade shame for curiosity and to see choice, consent, and play as skills you practice rather than sins you hide.
8 Clitaholics Anonymous
Roach parishioners gather in a church hall to confess a familiar habit: chasing quick, clitoral release. The scene humorously stages a “support group” to question our cultural ceiling around pleasure. It suggests that when sex is goal-oriented, we can miss deeper waves of sensation, intimacy, and repair available through slower, whole-body arousal. Without moralizing, the piece invites curiosity beyond the climax script—toward consent, breath, and attention as practices that expand what pleasure can do.
9 Trust the Experts
This scene frames modern medicine and Big Pharma as a faith—complete with ritual, catechism, and unquestioned authority. Without denying medicine’s real power, the work asks what we surrender when compliance replaces inquiry and prescription eclipses lived, embodied knowledge. It invites a stance that is both grateful and skeptical, where consent and discernment remain central to care.
10 Is this All Madness (block letters by Alice Turpin)
Born from the tension of the pandemic, “Is This All Madness” peers into the psyche of a society gripped by fear and division. It asks what happens when collective anxiety becomes the norm — when sanity itself is measured by compliance, and the shadow of uncertainty is too frightening to face.
11 Monday Morning
The innocence of childhood shouldn’t coexist with terror — yet here, it does. This piece confronts the quiet horror of a culture that has learned to accept the unthinkable. Beneath the bright colors and alphabet letters lies a collective numbness, a normalization of violence that seeps into everyday life. What happens to the soul of a nation when its children can’t feel safe at school?
12 Left Brain Madness
“Left Brain Madness” looks at the shadow of our devotion to analysis, ranking, and proof. Academia promises certainty, yet the march of pinned bodies shows how control can drain life of its texture. When we overfit to reason, we silence intuition, creativity, and the messy truths that make us human.
13 Mad Hatters’ Tea Party
A gathering of roaches for tea — absurd, whimsical, and oddly cheerful. In this topsy-turvy world, the creatures of decay host a celebration, inviting us to laugh at the madness.
14 Hungover (postcard by David Shrigley)
In Ireland, drinking is celebration, connection, escape — and inheritance. This piece reflects on how easily we mistake dysfunction for tradition, and pain for belonging. Beneath the laughter and ritual lies a quiet emptiness, the morning-after reckoning with what we refuse to feel. What we call “normal” is often just the story we’ve been told to survive.
15 Vaginal Portal
Vaginal portal — a threshold into the sacred. The piece reclaims the vagina as both origin and oracle, a symbol of creation, vulnerability, and immense power. To pass through it is to confront the collective discomfort surrounding the feminine body and to acknowledge the deep trauma — and potential for healing — that lives within it.
16 Womens’ Moon gathering
Women gather in truth-telling and communion. In their circle, stories are shared, laughter and grief interweave, and something ancient stirs. The piece speaks to the sanctity of women coming together — to witness one another, to remember the wisdom of the body, and to honor the cycles that shape our lives.
17 Wall of Vulvas
Wall of Reverence invites stillness and reflection. Each form is unique — tender, imperfect, alive. The work reimagines what is deemed sacred, shifting reverence from the distant and abstract to the deeply human. It asks us to consider why the source of life itself has been hidden, shamed, and stripped of its holiness — and what changes when we choose to honor it instead.
18 Cuntry Club
A group of lady roaches recline by the pool, naked and unabashed. This surreal scene flips the polished veneer of exclusivity and “good taste” on its back, exposing what lies beneath polite society. Playing on the prim reputation of Country Clubs, the piece uses satire to highlight hypocrisy, repression, and the absurdity of moral posturing.
19 Cunt
Two roaches gather, asking how a word for the source of life became an insult. The work traces the journey from slur to standard-bearer, showing language as a site of power that can be taken back. ‘Cunt’ invites viewers to notice who benefits when bodies are shamed—and what changes when the name returns to its owner.
20 Pussy Obsession
A cluster of lady roaches looks on, one particularly scandalized by the homeowner’s supposed “pussy obsession” — a wall crowded with cats. Beneath the humor lies a mirror: how easily fascination becomes taboo, how reverence turns to ridicule. Placed beside The Wall of Vulvas, the piece toys with judgment, shame, and the uneasy relationship we have with the feminine body.
21 Menstrual Art
This piece points to the quiet power of the menstrual cycle — a force both creative and purgative — while poking at the discomfort it still provokes. It speaks to the reclamation of what has long been hidden, the invitation to see blood not as shame, but as origin.
22 Mass
A meditation on obedience, guilt, and the collective need to believe in something higher — even when it corrupts. “Mass” reflects on the conditioning of faith and the shadows it casts in the psyche. The insects gather reverently, enacting the rituals of devotion while something unspoken festers beneath the surface. What parts of ourselves do we sacrifice at the altar of belonging?
23 Confession
The things we bury don’t disappear — they fester in the dark, shaping who we become. This piece speaks to the ache of hiding, the weight of unspoken truths, and the hypocrisy we inherit when fear replaces honesty. Behind every confession is a hunger to be known, and the terror that we might be.
24 Art Lovers on Coke (postcard by Francis Bacon)
What at first looks glamorous quickly curdles — a familiar cocktail of excess, emptiness, and escape. This piece points to the normalization of addiction across all levels of society, where dysfunction is dressed up as culture and self-destruction masquerades as sophistication.
25 Bar Scene (quote from Anodea Judith)
The room looks civil, yet the question exposes the quiet pressure to self-edit. The piece studies how manners can become a mask, how alcohol is used as permission, and how honesty struggles to find airtime in rooms built for small talk.
26 Therapy
This piece normalizes saying the unsayable: the parts we hide for fear of judgment. By turning shame into shared language, it reframes therapy as everyday hygiene for the psyche, where telling the truth is less about fixing and more about finally being met.
27 Dinner Parties are such Bollox (block letters by Alice Turpin)
The scene pokes at our collective conditioning — what we’ve been taught to view as refined, respectable, or right. Here, the roaches become a mirror for the unconscious: our hunger for status, belonging, and approval dressed up as civility. Beneath the polish lies instinct, absurdity, and the quiet rot of pretense.
28 The Insomniac
A therapist and patient sit suspended in the sleepless hours, beneath a framed question — “Did you sleep ok?” — that hovers like an accusation. The work explores the quiet torment of insomnia, a condition both deeply personal and widely shared. With a touch of dark humor, it reflects the modern struggle to find rest in a restless world
29 At the Art Gallery
When we look without flinching, the forbidden turns ordinary, even funny. The piece plays with who is allowed to gaze, what we call obscene, and how humor can unwind shame. It invites a slower, curious look at what culture taught us to hide.
30 The Dinner Party (postcard by Martin Creed)
A hush hangs over the table while appetites run the room. The roaches dine with ceremony, turning table manners into camouflage. Trinkets sparkle, a double-helix mobile turns, and an orange stain creeps from the corner—signals that civility sits inches from chaos. The piece invites us to notice how desire and excess thrive under polite conversation, and how the shadow finds its seat whenever we gather to feast.