Flora McLachlan RE RCA

I was elected to
membership of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE) in 2008 and became a Fellow
in 2013. I’m a director of Aberystwyth Printmakers and I have an MA in Fine Art from
Aberystwyth School of Art. I'm a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy. Prizes include
the Norman Ackroyd Prize for Etching at the Impressions Printmaking Biennial in Ireland,
2019, and First Prize in the Remarque International Print Prize 2019 in Albuquerque, USA.
This year I showed three etchings at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and was
shortlisted for the prestigious Boodle Hatfield Print Prize 2023. I have work in the
Ashmolean Museum and British Museum Collections.
I enjoy interpreting imagery through paint and print, and watching the resulting
metamorphoses. My images spring from my sense of the mythical and archetypal elements
of landscape, as found in the literary storytelling tradition. I grew up reading fairy stories
and folk tales, and I am fascinated by how the residue of this reading persists in our
interpretation of, and in our connection with, the landscape. The motif of the
transformative quest in medieval romance informs my work with a sense of travelling
outwards into the wild forest, and inwards into the mysteries of the self. I frame my search
within my interaction with materials, whether paper, canvas, copper plate, cardboard, or
lithographic stone, responding to its nature, and noticing how my materials mark it. I enjoy
working with unexpected traces, observing them and responding to them, to dream