Marie Le Lievre

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Marie Le Lievre studied Criminology and Education before focussing upon her artistic career in Fine Arts. She travelled extensively abroad while living and working in London, Israel and Argentina. 

The key to understanding the work of Lyttelton-based artist Marie Le Lievre is that everything depends on an interplay between what is revealed and what the artist obscures, a dialogue between private inscape and public world. Le Lievre is intensely interested in the psychological and sociological – her first degree was in criminology rather than fine art – and on some levels her art operates as a kind of mind map of emotional and mental states. It is intuitive, automatic, and richly nuanced. It reminds us of the contingency of communication and the impossibility of true connection between isolated minds: an adjacent visual accompaniment to Wittgenstein’s Seventh Proposition: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” – Andrew Paul Wood