In her photographic works, Cleary explores the experience of uncertainty as it pertains to the acts of perceiving, understanding and knowing. Each work—for example, a place setting, a door knocker, a still life—starts with an idea which is fabricated in the studio and precisely composed and lit for the camera.

For Cleary, photography offers an opportunity to consider the possibilities of framing and complicates the knowability of her chosen subjects. She states, “By extracting an object from its context a layer of mystery is added or a layer of knowability is removed. As two-dimensional representations of the three-dimensional world, photographs also make it harder to understand material. In image form, the surfaces of fabrications and constructions are more difficult to parse out. The image abstracts the true surface of an object articulating it onto a flat piece of paper. Both aspects of photography, the removal of context and the removal of texture, provide distance between seeing and knowing what one is seeing.” In deliberately seeking to complicate the ability to understand what it is we are encountering, her work examines the subjective and acknowledges the ever-present role of invention in interpretation.