Maddie Leach
About Maddie Leach
Teaching focus: MFA Fine Arts programme; Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art.
Doctoral supervision: Seda Yildiz, artistic research project 'Curating as echoing: Disclosing Collaborative Socially Engaged Art Practice'.
Research interests: place-based artistic practices & research; public art; conceptual practices; narrative and writing within artistic practice.
Pronouns: she/they
Maddie Leach is an artist from New Zealand of Ashkenazi, English, and Scottish descent. She holds a PhD from the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Her BFA and MFA education was in sculpture. Before coming to Gothenburg in 2016, Maddie was a founding staff member, and programme director for the MFA Fine Arts, at Whiti o Rehua / The School of Art at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand.
Maddie's artistic projects have included building an ice rink in a public gallery and a 16-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; sent 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. 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. Maddie's 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.
She has worked with international curators Charles Esche, Claire Doherty, Hou Hanru, Nav Haq and Mercedes Vicente; Australasian curators Blair French, Zara Stanhope, David Cross, Christina Barton, Natasha Conland, Charlotte Huddleston, Abby Cunnane and Bruce Phillips. Maddie has been an artist in residence with Hedlandet Residens (2024 & 2025 Torna Hällestad, Sweden); Serlachius Museums (2019, Mänttä, Finland); CAG Field House Programme (2015, 2016, 2018, Vancouver, Canada); National Sculpture Factory (2008, Cork, Ireland); International Art Space (2014, Western Australia); Spike Island (2014, Bristol, UK) and Hyde Park Art Center (2008, 2010, Chicago, USA).
In September 2020, she received a four-year research grant from Formas (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) to lead the project The fountain: An art-technological-social-drama. The funding has assisted Maddie to produce the international symposium Fountains, Failure, Futures: The Afterlives of Public Art in Lund in 2023 and to co-edit a special issue of the journal Art and the Public Sphere (Intellect, UK, 2026). In November 2026 she will publish a book about Lund's LTH fountain with Null & Void Books and designer Jonas Williamsson.