Marielle MacLeman’s practice is concerned with the material traces of progress and decline – unfolding the interplay between the built and natural, machine and handmade, while reconstituting remnants.

The dialogue between research and materials is key. She melds craft and fine art processes with context-specific details to interrogate their potential to produce meaning. Dust is used as pigment, debris for sculpting, shadows for patternmaking, and sunlight as a tool for drawing on natural dyes, which transmute the colours of site.

She uses papermaking, printing, textile, and sculptural processes to reimagine the forms and practices of heritage and modernity and tell stories of collective action, commemoration, and conservation. Terrazzo is made from beach glass, friezes from factory trimmings, botanical stucco from lab coats, veneers from diseased tree chippings, campaign posters from grass clippings, quilts from tumble dryer lint, and the weft threads of souvenirs reworked as tasselled fringes and embroidery. Dissected uniforms and traditional dress are reformed as artefacts or rearranged as monuments cut from preservation Tyvek for silk window installations serving as markers of time.

Increasingly experimental and site responsive, her work embraces precarity to playfully but critically translate the social and environmental fallout from trade and travel. Installations engage in material shapeshifting, where silk impressions of mass-produced objects appear like oversized watercolours or stained glass; where debris netting, hazard tape, and materials on the brink of transformation or disposal are incorporated as emblematic tipping points; and where artworks also evolve during and between shows.

Underpinned by an unwavering commitment to process, a curiosity for uncertainties, and careful investigations of site, MacLeman’s artworks literally and metaphorically piece together lost histories, invisible labour, and ideas of value and care. Rigour and order characterise her approach to things in a state of flux.

Born in Scotland and based in Ireland, recent solo presentations of Marielle MacLeman’s work include The Visitors at Butler Gallery, To Impermanent Collections and Scattered Acquisitions at Kunstverein Aughrim, We are collecting today for tomorrow at Etnografski Muzej Zagreb, In Course of Rearrangement at The LAB Gallery and Galway Arts Centre, and Landscape Machine at The Dock. Her work has been included in major group shows include Zrak/The Air at BIEN 2025 in Slovenia, Staying with the Trouble at IMMA, Take Hold at CCA Derry-Londonderry, Swallowing Geography at Regional Cultural Centre Letterkenny and Speech Sounds at VISUAL Carlow. Commissions include Glenveagh Homes, 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, Saolta Arts and 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 in the Arts Council Collection and the collection of University of Galway, Layer House, Kranj, and private collections.