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14th December 2024 - 9th February 2025
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Main Gallery
Exhibition Opening: Saturday 14th December, 2.30 - 4.30pm. All Welcome.
Butler Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Galway-based artist Marielle MacLeman. MacLeman’s work applies craft references to rework materials gathered in the wake of storms or human activity. This is MacLeman’s first major museum show in Ireland.
Exploring loss and preservation amid scientific research to improve native woodland, The Visitors is a playful yet critical lament on Ireland’s built and natural heritage. Working with salvaged and scavenged materials, her artworks interact like a set—a room for visitors—invited and invasive—ready to come apart for the next act.
Animating a scene change between the domestic and global, MacLeman recreates the decorative finishes of a house using the evergreen protagonists of its garden – plants known to steal daylight from others and predicted to prevail in the face of climate change. The dyes from these and native woodland plants provide the pallete for the exhibition. Their forms inspire ornamental stucco made from pulped lab coats – acknowledging the role historic estates had in introducing invasive species and how some are now host to the gene banks and labs of researchers responding to today’s threats to forests.
Translating impermanence and complicity by combining natural materials with the ducting, hazard tape, and polypropylene ropes of forestry and sites of urban transformation, MacLeman veneers surfaces with paper made from the remains of felled and fallen trees and rubbings from a ruin and a mass produced door. Centre stage in the gallery, she embellishes a monumental façade of debris netting with silk dyed with ivy—the ubiquitous underminer of walls and trees, which at some point, is also essential in stabilising their rotting remains.
Drawn to transitory aspects of site, MacLeman’s work frequently explores the interplay between what is built and natural or between digital and handmade in the quest for progress, in installations that she has described as “teetering between celebration and decline”. The dialogue between materials and narrative is key. Found or context-specific media are combined with innovative craft techniques to interrogate their potential to produce meaning. Increasingly, she translates precarity and fallout from land use and trade by employing materials on the brink of transformation or associated with waste.
About the Artist
Marielle MacLeman studied Drawing and Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee (1998). Recent solo presentations of her work include Kunstverein Aughrim; Etnografski Muzej Zagreb; reGalerija, Zabok; The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon; The LAB Gallery, Dublin; and Galway Arts Centre. Recent group shows include Leitrim Sculpture Centre’; VISUAL, 126 Gallery, Roscommon Arts Centre; and Regional Cultural Centre. Commissions include Temple Bar Gallery + Studios for Dublin Art Book Fair 2022; Meta Dublin; TULCA’s UnSelfing Programme for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture; Workhouse Union, Callan; Saolta Arts; WHAT. In 2023, she was awarded the Briefing on Soft Arts Residency at Center for Research of Fashion and Clothing (CIMO), Zagreb, and a Landscape, Ecology & Environment Research Residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre. She has received numerous awards including Arts Council Bursary Awards, Galway City Council Creative Practitioner Bursaries, a Create/Arts Council Artist in the Community Scheme Bursary Award 2018: Collaborative Arts in Health Contexts and a Galway Arts Centre and Galway Culture Company Artist Bursary Award 2024. Her work is represented in the Arts Council Collection and the collection of University of Galway.
Marielle MacLeman’s work for The Visitors has been supported by an Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary Award 2024, an Arts Council Project Award 2024 (Planning and Pre-production), a Galway City Council Creative Practitioner Bursary 2024. The Visitors was developed through her yearlong collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim, a LEER Residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, and with thanks to Dheeraj Rathore, Research Officer in Tree Improvement at Teagasc.
Learning & Public Engagement Events
Artist Talk: Thursday 23rd January, 6:00pm. Marielle MacLeman in conversation with Kate Strain, Kunstverein Aughrim and Anna O’Sullivan, Butler Gallery. Book your free ticket here.
