Maddie Leach is an artist from New Zealand of Ashkenazi, English, and Scottish descent. She now lives in Lund, Sweden.
Her sculptural projects include building an ice rink in a public gallery and a 17-foot sailboat for the roof of New Zealand’s national museum. She has shipped a Eucalyptus tree across the Pacific Ocean from New Zealand to Chile, and back again; delivered 325 litres of water from the Te Waihou ‘Blue Spring' to Jakarta, where it vanished; and coaxed a community of writers, businessmen, council officials and a newspaper editor to imagine a ‘whale' made from 70 litres of used mineral oil and one-tonne of cement. In 2017 she produced The Grief Prophesy album, working with two Swedish musicians and visual artist ’Necrolord’ to reinterpret an unremarkable black metal track into a powerful lament.
Her work is recognised for its conceptual agility as elements of uncertainty and risk emerge in her process, and for the varied material resolution of her artworks – having fabricated objects or had them fabricated for her, used text and print media, worked with video, performative actions, and processes of exchange.