Gibson was born in Montreal and studied psychology at the University of Victoria, where between 1973 and 1974 he drew weekly comics for the student newspaper.
[3] In 1978 he received Canadian government funding to build his own holography studio and study holographic special effects.
[8][9] Because of this incident, Gibson was expelled from Goldsmiths College on 21 December 1987, where he was studying post-graduate art, design and technology.
[14] On Tuesday, 9 February 1989, the jury of 10 women and 2 men[15] found Gibson and Sylveire guilty of outraging public decency.
[24] Since the trial, writers such as John A. Walker[25] and Eduardo Kac[26] have continued to reflect on the sculpture and its social implications.
[28] Subsequent performance pieces included standing in front of the Director of Public Prosecutions office in London with a live rat in front of his face,[29] enabling people to kill live insects in Plymouth (where he was arrested but released without charge),[30][31] and questioning the killing of slugs in Vancouver, Canada.
Because England does not have a specific law against cannibalism, he legally ate a canapé of donated human tonsils in Walthamstow High Street, London.
[36] However, the charge of publicly exhibiting a disgusting object was dropped, and two months later he finally ate the piece of human testicle on the steps of the Vancouver court house.
[39][40] On the morning of 6 January, a group of animal rights activists from the Lifeforce Foundation stole the device Gibson was going to use to crush the rat.
[50][51] For the tenth anniversary of the performance, Radix Theatre, under the direction of Andrew Laurenson, created the Sniffy the Rat bus tour.
[52] While living in London, Gibson visited Grizedale Forest in the north of England, which is home to an assortment of outdoor sculptures.
In 1992, he received funding from the British Columbia Ministry of Tourism to develop a similar project in the mountains near Vancouver.
[54] Following Artropolis, he was commissioned by the City of Vancouver to design and build four community bird feeders on the Woodland Drive Bridge.
Working closely with architect Moshe Safdie, they managed the installation of the Joseph Montague fountain and they established a public art endowment fund.
[64] Gibson gave a talk to the International Society for Anthrozoology (ISAZ) at Cambridge University in July 2012 about the use of live insects in art and entertainment.
[65][66] On 8 February 2017 Gibson walked naked in front of the Vancouver Law Courts in the middle of winter to protest Canada's ban of genetic engineering of the human genome.