A Park and a Rock
Abstract
Since 2008 Maddie Leach has been an artist in residence in Cork, Beaver Island,
Tasmania, New Plymouth, Mandurah, and Vancouver. These opportunities
have been directly linked to invitations to develop new place-responsive projects
in which she has explored historical narratives, community, and memory through
processes of reproduction, reiteration, temporality, and dispersal. Leach has
a long-standing interest in public practices, site specificity and, more recently,
the vested interests of cultural commissioners to reflect and affirm a positive
sense of place back to its citizens. This text was written as a reflection on two
different experiences of ‘residency’ and the artworks that were subsequently
produced. The first, Evening Echo (2011-ongoing) centres around an annual cycle
of illuminated lights in a small park in Cork’s old Jewish neighbourhood;
28th October 2834 (2015) focuses on the way in which an encounter with a
memorial rock and a missing plaque revealed suppressed tensions in small
town Western Australia. Both projects have composed an ‘alternate politic’ to
official histories, magnifying and revealing their gaps.