Publications

… Despite its fragmentary nature and lightness of touch then, there is a sense of the whole in Brigid McLeer’s practice. There is a completeness which lies in the thoughts and sensibilities which run through her entire pracitce, both binding it but also lubricating its complex accretions, pacings and quotations… I am reminded that to recognise, to respect, to respond, to live with multiple perspectives and positions may be deeply challenging, but also critically important, because the alternative is altogether more disturbing in its singular lack of promise and potential… (Steve Dutton, Introduction)

I am returning to the house to partake in this means, through photographs, writings and other records that are trying to resist capture and admit a form of political appearance in which equality reigns. I am returning to the house to partake in a radical figuring of the democratic, a ‘promise of politics’ that the house and its oval room prefigure. And I am not the only one…

In the video Isola:Incontro McLeer endeavours to trace the pattern of a shadow over the course a day, as it carves an arc through the ferocious heat of the midday sun into the faint and dissipating evening. The shadow itself is cast from an ornately decorated gate that formerly marked the entrance to the psychiatric hospital of San Servolo in Venice; a place of incarceration and isolation previously inhabited (involuntarily) by hundreds of men deemed somehow unfit or unable to participate in society at large. McLeer’s tending to the shadow is then as much a mode of mindfulness or memorial; a state of immersion that calls to attention the lives of these unknown individuals whose right to life had been stripped away by the institution and by societal notions of normality. (Emma Cocker, Somehow Between the Water and the Wind)

The first layer is a wash of colour. Here is the founding superfluity of paint, upon which the image will float and draw. The image; now this one, now that one, thrilled to win, momentarily, in this risk terrain. The scene; a building, a tree, two trees, two gatherings of buildings – immanence posing as a view …