Marielle MacLeman (IE)

About works Still falling, inside today, Margins, Intangible Assets and Cumulative Losses:

As residue, dust is a marker of time and happening that blurs the boundaries between the past and present, and between inside and outside. At Layer House, Marielle MacLeman uses textile dust gathered from hand and machine production processes to call attention to invisible labour and lost industries. Employing papermaking processes to form reconstituted cloth from the sweepings of factory floors and sewing machines, recycled textiles, the white cotton work coats of conservation, and a discarded nurse’s uniform, her sculptural assemblages explore ideas of care, loss, and value. Staged on structures coated with iron oxide to recall the dust said to have stained Jesenice, they borrow their titles from the language of commerce and their forms from the decorative features of Layer House and its environs.

Still falling, inside today draws from a view of terracotta roof tiles designed to hold frozen air particles outside, to make a pattern rendered in textile particles like flock wallpaper. Margins recreates the painted borders on the walls of Layer House - pigments from Leopold’s time swapped for stencilled textile dust - and strings beads made from the trimmings of adjacent artworks. Intangible Assets unspools the artist’s dreams, pulling the weft of his fresco sky from the warp, the linen threads pulped and transferred to a new form. Cumulative Losses revisits a previous collaboration with artisan rugmakers in Zabok curated by the Center for Research of Fashion and Clothing from Zagreb. Visually referencing the shuttles and punched cards of textile production, the work fuses wool dust shorn from the rugmaker’s other projects with recycled floorcovering - a composite material made from the offcuts of European garment production and secondhand clothing. In reconfiguring the remains of the remains, MacLeman melds inside with outside, and floor meets ceiling.

Born in Scotland and based on the west coast of Ireland, Marielle MacLeman studied Drawing and Painting and works across two-dimensions, sculptural assemblage, and installation. The dialogue between materials and research is key - combining found or context-specific media with innovative craft techniques and references to interrogate their potential to produce meaning. She is interested in the interplay between the built and natural, and the digital and handmade, in between progress and decline. This often manifests through themes of collective action, commemoration, or conservation. Her practice is rooted in the application of care, calling attention to the ways it is enacted or undermined in the human drive to create, collect, and understand.

About Residual Values:

Residual Values considers local and global aspects of textile heritage and ideas of care, value and preservation. Marielle MacLeman applies the dissected pattern of traditional folk clothing to the windows of GONG Gallery, cutting them from silk and preservation grade Tyvek commonly used to store museum artefacts. Employing the fugitive nature of natural dyes, the work draws its colour palette from the former sericulture industry of the region and the cherry crops that replaced it. Connecting the Mulberry trees on the street outside with the soft hues on the glazing, the colours shift and fade over the course of the exhibition - Tyvek shapes masking silk and drawing with the sun’s rays as a subtle marker of time.