Artist holds first major museum show in Kilkenny

An exhibition of new work by Galway-based artist Marielle MacLeman is currently taking place at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny.

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.

The exhibition at the Butler Gallery runs until February 9.