Mairéad McClean uses material from a diverse range of sources in her films: found footage, historical and family archives, filmed performances and televisual media, appear in many of her single screen films and installations. Her work often features people as they cope with forms of control. Whether the camera follows actual events or follows enactments by a performer, people are seen to challenge or circumvent authority or to improvise with their own actions.
McClean, currently works between Northern Ireland and Bath, UK. She taught on the BA Media and Communications at The University of Greenwich, London for 12 years and Experimental Film-making at Met Film School, Ealing. She worked as a tutor on Fine Art degree courses in Leicester, Nottingham and Cheltenham Spa and continues to give talks and lectures at Art Colleges, Universities, galleries and museums about her art practice.
I have produced films and installations for galleries and museums since 1989 and have received awards in the UK, Ireland, France and Russia. In April 2021, I was selected as official Artist in Residence for the Beyond 2022/ Archive Project as part of the Decade of Centenaries Programme in Ireland running in collaboration with Trinity College Long Room Hub, Dublin and the Virtual Record Treasury Ireland, completing a 16mm film in 2024 called Acts of Memory. In 2018, I was commissioned by The Wapping Project, London to produce a multi-screened installation called, Making Her Mark, (2018) and a film called A Line Was Drawn(2019) which used the poetics of performance to explore the concept of borders from multiple viewpoints. This work was filmed and exhibited in a solo show in The Outer Hebrides in August 2018 and shown at The BFI London Film Festival, Experimenta, 2019. My video work, No More, (2013), exploring questions around the introduction of Internment without trial in Northern Ireland in 1971, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize, Belfast in 2014. Other recent notable exhibitions and screenings include: The Centre Cultural Irlandais, Paris:A Nation Under The Influence: Ireland at 100 (2022), The Border, Deutscher Künstlerbund e.V , Berlin, 2020, The Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2020, The Now & After Exhibition, Video Art Festival, Fabrika, Moscow 2017, The International Film Festival Faces of Conflict, Pittsburgh, USA, 2016, and CCA Glasgow: The Shock of Victory, 2015. No More is held in the National Collection of Ireland at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and The Arts Council of Northern Ireland. As of 2023, Making Her Mark is in The Arts Council of Irelands Collection.
Selected publications:
Portraits of Irish Art in Practice by Prof Jennifer Keating (USA), Palgrave Macmillan, 2023: A book on the art practice of; Ursula Burke, Mairéad McClean, Paula McFetridge & RitaDuffy.
Here | print publication to accompany a solo show at Belfast Exposed by Mairéad McClean including an introduction by Deirdre Robb and essays by Gary Sangster and Shirley McWilliam. Published by Belfast Exposed, 2022
Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989, Yale University Press | Edited by Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds and Sarah Perks, 2019
To Step Across The Line | print publication The Wapping Project featuring the new writing by Lea Anderson, Kapka Kassbova and Tara Bergin, text and image contribution by Mairéad McClean, 2018
