Maddie Leach’s practice is largely project based, investigating viable ways of making artworks in order to interpret and respond to specific place-determined content. Leach has consistently varied the way she resolves her work: having fabricated objects or had them fabricated for her, used text and print media, video, performative actions and processes of exchange. She establishes idiosyncratic compositions of seemingly disparate elements to suggest the dynamic and diffuse nature of place, often imparting a transient, almost fugitive, status to the artwork. Leach is interested in the space between what is expected and what happens, between potential and actual forms.

Maddie Leach has received a number of significant local and international project commissions, including contributing works to If you were to live here…, the 5th Auckland Triennial, 2013; Iteration: Again, Tasmania, 2011; for the National Sculpture Factory and Cork City Council, Ireland, 2011; Close Encounters, Chicago, 2010; and One Day Sculpture, New Zealand, 2008. Her work has been included in the group exhibitions Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, 2012; The Obstinate Object, City Gallery Wellington, 2012; Reason & Rhyme, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2011; It happened that, St Paul Street Gallery, Auckland, 2010, and Primary Products, Adam Art Gallery, 2007. Leach has been awarded residencies with International Art Space in Perth for Spaced 2: Future Recall 2014–15 and with Spike Island, Bristol, UK, in 2014. She was Taranaki Artist in Residence at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2012 and International Artist in Residence at the National Sculpture Factory, Cork City, Ireland, 2008. She has an MFA in sculpture from the University of Canterbury.