Artist Mairéad McClean, pictured with her work, No More, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
Mairéad McClean is a visual artist and filmmaker working with analogue film, video, photography, drawing and installation. Her work is rooted in an interest in memory, history and the traces we leave behind.
McClean works by noticing. She follows connections between things that may not appear to have a direct relationship, sometimes through coincidence, sometimes through research, conversation or simply by paying attention. She listens, reads, writes, draws, films and collects. Found footage, historical and family archives, filmed performance and televisual material often become starting points for her work.
McClean has been making and exhibiting work for more than 30 years, with work presented in Poland, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, the USA, Russia and throughout the UK and Ireland. She has received the MAC International Art Prize(Belfast, 2014) and the Curator's Award at Kinoskop 6 Experimental Film Festival (2024). Her film and video work is held in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Arts Council of Ireland and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Recent work includes Acts of Memory (2024), Cineland Zoom (2025) and Breath Memory / Pamięć oddechu (2025).
McClean was Reader in Film and Video Arts at the University of Greenwich, London, where she taught documentary, experimental film and photographic practice for 12 years. She left academic life in 2012 to concentrate on her own work.
For exhibition, screening, curatorial, research or educational enquiries, please get in touch.