The Landscape, Ecology & Environment Research Residencies is a biannual project initiated at Leitrim Sculpture Centre during 2020. Now in its third rendition the programme provides artists with a wide range of supports for the development of new engagements with landscape, ecology and/or environmental contexts and themes and to develop from this work, new directions, approaches and methodologies within their own practice. Alongside an exhibition of art works in various mediums during June 2024 artists will also included research portfolio’s that afford a unique perspective on to the different processes and orientations of their practice.
Artists and Projects participating in the LEER 2023/24 research residencies include:
Tim Collins and Reiko Goto
Vanya Lambrecht Ward
Marielle Macleman
Noah Rose
Tim Collins and Reiko Goto
Over the past thirty years the Collins & Goto studio are known for long-term projects that involve socially engaged environmental research and practice; with additional focus on empathic relationship with more-than-human others. Tim Collins and Reiko Goto are visual artists with primary interests in sculpture, installation, and media. They seek out experiences of the world that challenge what they think they know; and try to bring that moment into the work. When perception and concept is unsettled, meaning and value evolve.
Recent work involves the tensions between boglands and cutaway peatlands in Ireland; Deep Mapping | Lough Boora Sculpture Park (2020). A focus on deep mapping a Caledonian Pine Forest in Scotland: Future Forest: The Blackwood, Rannoch Scotland); Sylva Caledonia (2016); Caledonian Decoy (2017). An elucidation of photosynthesis and transpiration in the sculptural instrument PLEIN AIR presented in North Carolina (2019) Glasgow (2017) and Cologne (2016). They have also developed relational approaches to climate change integrating empathy, science and technology, The Ethical Aesthetic Impulse (2010); CO2 Edinburgh (2013). Earlier work focused on community dialogue about post-industrial public space a mix of ecological recovery and cultural renewal on Nine Mile Run (1997-2000); and 3 Rivers 2nd Nature (2000-2005), They have worked with musicians, planners, politicians, programmers, natural scientists, and technologists as well as historians and philosophers to realize work.
Marielle Macleman
MacLeman's work explores ideas of place through two-dimensional and sculptural processes and site-specific installation. It calls attention to the human drive to create, collect, and understand, and the implications of these actions. Drawn to transitory aspects of site, she is interested in the tensions and interplay between what is built and natural, digital and handmade, and between progress and decline. This often manifests through themes of collective action, commemoration, or conservation. Employing research and process-led approaches, she borrows the forms and practices of institutions and industry to articulate the material trace of histories. The dialogue between materials and narrative is key, often combining context-specific materials with craft references to interrogate their potential.
Increasingly, ideas of care and precarity, and the fallout from land use and global trade are mediated through found materials, otherwise regarded as waste or on the brink of transformation. Examples include reconstituting tumble dryer lint as cloth, reconfiguring beach glass gathered in the wake of a storm as institutional terrazzo, rendering botanical studies in the remnants of a stranger’s campfire, and weaving the ‘winning’ icons of sales merchandising as a sprawling installation in a vacant retail unit. Natural materials are also processed and organised to emulate human interventions with land – the patterns of digitally printed fabric used in costume design and assemblage are composed from the pressed and collaged forms of decaying wildflowers, and handmade paper compositions are stencilled into cotton linters with the first cut of grass from a new public park. The palettes of naturally dyed blankets, carpets and embroidered scaffolding mesh are gleaned from invasive and native flora and used for their connotations of place-making, belonging, exclusion and protection.
Based in Galway, Marielle Macleman works across two-dimensional and sculptural processes and site-specific installation. She has exhibited in the UK, Ireland, France and Italy with recent solo shows at The LAB Gallery and Galway Arts Centre, and group exhibitions including VISUAL, 126 Gallery, Roscommon Arts Centre, and Regional Cultural Centre. Recent commissions include Temple Bar Gallery + Studios for Dublin Art Book Fair 2022, Meta Dublin, Workhouse Union, WHAT, Saolta Arts and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts’ UnSelfing Programme for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture. Her work is included in private collections in the UK and Ireland and in the collections of the Arts Council of Ireland and the University of Galway. She has received numerous awards from organisations including the Arts Council of Ireland, Galway City Council, Create, Scottish Arts Council, and Glasgow City Council. Residencies include Briefing on Soft Arts at CIMO, Zagreb, Cow House Studios, Centre for Creative Arts and Media, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, The James Mitchell Geology Museum and The Zoology & Marine Biology Museum, NUIG, and Galway Arts Centre. Alongside her studio practice, she has an extensive Arts and Health practice encompassing public art commissions, publishing, and developing participatory arts programmes.
A co-commission for the To Care programme by Workhouse Union and VISUAL, installed for Speech Sounds curated by Iarlaith Ni Fheorais at VISUAL, Carlow
Vanya Lambrecht Ward
Vanya Lambrecht Ward’s work investigates human relationships to environments through our intertwined connections to fungi. Over recent years she has extensively researched and explored the relatively unchartered territory of the mycological kingdom through a variety of mediums and approaches. Interested in the role of these microorganisms in our evolution to date, as well as our future thinking, she asks; ‘How and what can we learn from funga, and how can we create new understandings that help repair our distorted relationship to waste, decay and renewal and other associated biological processes.’
Her approach takes many forms, and explores all sorts of materials and techniques in a quest to articulate and translate new ideas and discoveries. Often using the book-form as a key expression in her practice Lambrecht Ward is currently working on a (long-term) series of book-works that bring together on-going findings, collaborations, citizen science, fungal activism and visual and written explorations that emerge from her research both in the studio and out in the field.
Vanya Lambrecht Ward is a visual artist based in Co. Sligo. She holds BA’s in both Fine Art and Architecture and a MA (Art in the Contemporary World) from NCAD. Since 2018 she has been a lecturer at YAADA, ATU Sligo. She has exhibited nationally & internationally, and received funding & awards from the Arts Council and Creative Ireland. Her work is included in private and public collections, including most recently, Trinity College Dublin Collection.
Noah Rose
Noah Rose’s practice moves across disciplines - centering around sculpture but incorporating drawing, installation, typography and archival research. Led by context and location, the work explores place through the deep mapping of archival and other written texts in different languages, and by employing collaborative translation processes as part of an autoethnographic methodology.
Using linguistic elements - in written, printed, carved, or other material form - Rose explores language as both visual component and thematic driver in asking ‘how interdisciplinary sculpture can interact and directly engage with minority languages, place and communities to transmit cultural knowledge held in these languages,’.
Rose’s current research investigates the intersection between minority language, place, and sculpture, focusing on the materialisation of language through expanded sculptural practices such as letter-carving, sound installation, letterpress printmaking and site-responsive assemblage.
Noah Rose is a visual artist based in County Galway. His practice focuses primarily on context-led sculptural work outside of the gallery. He has undertaken numerous public art commissions and participated in research residencies, exhibitions, symposia and collaborative events both in Ireland and across the UK, Brasil, Catalunya, Denmark, and India.
Notable public art commissions have been: The Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery, Rossendale UK (2022-23); Oileán Chléire/ Cape Clear Island, Co. Cork (2021); ArtB&B, Blackpool, UK (2019); IPAS, Bhubaneswar, India (2018); Tír Sáile Residency Mayo (2017); Changing Tracks, Mayo/Catalunya/UK (2014); Burnley, UK (2010); Derry, N Ireland (2006). Solo exhibitions include: What Matter, Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2016) and Áras Inis Gluaire, Mayo (2017). Group exhibitions include: The Model, Sligo (2017), Claremorris Open (2017), Contrafogos (Pelotas, Brazil, 2016).
He is currently working on public art commissions in County Mayo, and research residencies at the Michael Davitt Museum, Co. Mayo and the Whitaker Museum, Lancashire UK. He is also undertaking a part-time practice-based PhD at The Glasgow School of Art.
Temporal Sculptural assemblage made from fragments of shipwreck and found granite boulders. Completed assemblage 3 hours before high tide, 2021.
(Collaboration with Selma Makela). Sound installation and community-engaged ceremony. (‘Keepers of the Weather Words’ Community Ceremony, Belmullet Pier, October 2017. With participation of Belmullet National School and RNLI Lifeboat crew).