Flora McLachlan

Flora is based in West Wales where she lives on the edge of the Preseli moors and makes etchings and lithographs. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy, and she has a Fine Art MA from Aberystwyth University.

Flora's imagery springs out of her sense of the mythical and archetypal elements of landscape, as found in the storytelling tradition. She is fascinated by how the residue of our childhood reading affects our emotional connection with the observed landscape.

In her work, images from her everyday life and her memory are gathered and bound into a tentative personal mythology that weaves her to the world and to other people. The motif of the transformative quest in medieval romance informs her work with a sense of travelling outwards into the wild forest, and inwards into the mysteries of the self. Her work is steered by the nature of her materials, whether local charcoal, copper plate, wood, or lithographic stone. She also uses invented forms of divination and ritual walking and dreams up magical happenings to explore the imagery she is using. A suggestion of reaching for the Other is always present in her work.

"I enjoy working with unexpected traces, observing and responding to them, to dream my images into being. Through the alchemical portals of etching or lithography, I can enter different magical worlds and make my work in those fairy tale atmospheres."