Maeve Brennan’s practice explores the political and historical resonance of material and place. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture and printed matter, her works excavate layered histories, revealing the unseen structures that determine our lived environment. Her long-term investigations, led by personal encounters, seek forms of knowledge that engage with the ‘underground’ – geologists, archaeologists, conservators, smugglers, looters, joyriders. Within the context of an extractive history, forms of repair are central to her work and her films often observe the quiet work of figures who maintain, restore and reassemble. Brennan is currently shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2024 and is in residence at Somerset House Studios. 

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
‘With Horses’ (2023) is a rumination on living and dying on a damaged planet. In the film we encounter a newborn foal amidst a landscape of plastic waste and a dying horse struggling to breath. The use of fossil fuels for cheap synthetic plastics has produced a throwaway culture worldwide through economic globalisation. Its toxic residue is distributed throughout the planet and deposited in the earth’s soil, forming a geological layer materially transformed by human activity in the age now known as the Anthropocene. Composed of two long shots, ‘With Horses’ confronts us with the human impact on the non-human world.

The manifesto asks us to grapple with knowledge systems that are ungraspable, that work to defy our understanding. Through these quiet and tender encounters with the cycle of life and death, ‘With Horses’ seeks to form an intimate point of connection with an otherwise incomprehensible ecological crisis.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
I will develop a work on ecological grief. Chemical pollution is a vast but ‘invisible’ ecological threat. The feathers of birds of prey are material chemical archives, now monitored to protect the environment. Pairing documentation of this scientific process with moving image portraits of the birds themselves, this work will make the insidious threat of chemical contaminants visible. The feather, associated with death, ritual and angels, gives form to the toxic age.

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