Description
Flora McLachlan studied English Language and Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford, before completing a diploma in illustration where she made her first etchings. She completed her MA in Fine Art (Printmaking) at Aberystwyth School of Art in 2021 and was an elected associate member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE) before becoming a fellow in 2013.
After relocating to Pembrokeshire in West Wales, Flora set up her own studio “that lies under the shadow of the Preseli hills on the edge of a wild moor”. This idyllic landscape provides her with a rich canvas to draw inspiration from. She notes that her work “grows out of the experience of observing the landscape and the process of translating this experience into print.”
Her main areas of expertise are etching, stone lithography and relief collagraph. She is particularly interested in painterly forms of etching, such as monotype transfer etching, which produces an image all in one etch. Working with sugar lift, spit bite and soft ground, she aims to make etchings that have the immediacy and flow of a painting. She also uses a semi-permeable white ground, diluted to make delicate washes under a traditional aquatint on copper.
Taking inspiration from mythology, ancient landscape and the themes of romantic medieval poetry, Flora merges folklore with the soft light and dark shadows of the etching medium:
“I bite heavy time-worn textures into my plates using soft ground, either making shadowy layered transfer drawings with soft pencils, or impressing textures into the soft ground with cut, carved and scored collagraph plates, to give the feeling of an old woodcut. Then I like to take this flat impression and scrape and burnish the light back in, sculpting the metal. Painting cloudy washes of spit bite aquatint over the image brings it to life, gives it weather, frees the waters of the waste land.” – Flora McLachlan.
Some of Flora’s recent exhibitions include The Land as Other, collaborative print exhibition at Impact 12, Bristol, 2022, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2021, and The Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize Exhibition, Gallery Oriel Ynys Môn, 2021. She has been shortlisted for the 2023 Boodle Hatfield Printmaking Prize at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2022, won the Tagsmart Print Prize at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in 2020 and the was joint winner of Student prize & winner of People’s Choice prize at the 2020 Flourish Print Award. Her work was featured in Art Maze Mag, Issue 22, May 2021.
