Biography

Celeste MacLeod-Brown (b.2004, Edinburgh) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and researcher. Her work tends to focus on overlaps between disciplines, generally concerned with event-based enquiry, curatorial knowledge, and feminist methods, and in 2023 she founded the curatorial initiative Naive Set Arts.

In 2024, Celeste was awarded the British Council Venice Biennale Fellowship, enabling her spend an extended period working at the Biennale and conducting curatorial research across Venice. The same year she also received the EAF x The Skinny Emerging Writers Award, and now contributes to the magazine on a freelance basis. She has shown and curated work across scotland, and internationally, and has held professional positions such as Production and Events Coordinator for Edinburgh Art Festival and Creative Associate at Hidden Door Festival. Celeste is now continuing directly into postgraduate research on the Goldsmiths UOL Advanced Practices Programme.

Artist Statement

Drawing on various modes of cultural production, my practice is primarily concerned with untangling ideas surrounding emotion and embodiment as they are situated within socio-political and institutional contexts. Through research into feminist and queer methodologies, particularly those related to affect theory and autotheory, I borrow from multiple disciplines to develop and apply reconfigured understandings of these ideas, often in relation to art-world structures.

I work predominantly with slippery and indeterminate realms of understanding, with a particular interest in the potential of alternative and affective modes of research. As such, I am drawn to mediums that share these qualities: writing, film, and audio tend to form the core of my practice. More specifically, the structural forms of the essay, autobiography, and ‘performing the self’ frequently shape how the work itself develops.

My practice is also deeply informed by first-hand experience working within the arts and cultural sector. I regularly explore ways to integrate institutional critique, not only into the content of the work, but also through considerations of how the work is situated within wider challenges that the arts both face and perpetuate. This is also integral to my curatorial approach, which in turn feeds back into my artistic and written practices. I often employ fictive and reflective strategies to speak through embodiment, treating personal encounters as curatorial situations, for example, to explore what individual experience might reveal about collective conditions.