The Wood Between the Worlds: Flora McLachlan

Sarah Wiseman Gallery is delighted to present 'The Wood Between the Worlds' a new solo exhibition from the acclaimed artist Flora McLachlan RE. Flora is best known for her printmaking which is inspired by her observation of landscape. She reads the forests and hills that surround her as a familiar and beloved place but also an ancient and unchanged world 'roamed by guardian spirit-like animals, shadowed by woods where the holly springs green amongst the bare oaks and beeches.'  Her work is distinctive by its dark, smudgy textures, illuminated by a floating moon or glimpse of a unicorn. 

In her solo exhibition, visitors can expect to see a new body of work, partly inspired by her recent MA, a portion of which was completed during lockdown. During this time, Flora experimented in etching techniques and with her painting and drawing, informing an expressive development in her work.  She explores the forest metaphor more deeply, wandering into the unknown, where we encounter her visions of fairy tale characters, put to work at a spinning wheel or cutting wheat:

Flora says, 'I'm interested in fairy tale tasks - spinning straw into gold, weaving shirts from nettle-flax in silence, as metaphors for the making of art, in magical terms. I made a series of etchings in early 2020 in which I used a very free-flowing painterly ground to resist the acid, so that I could scry into the drifting marks. '

'These peopled landscapes contained the stuff of dreams and yearning, archetypal stories of the past, folk tales, and my own self; all this took part in a journey through the unconscious, when no physical journeying was possible.'

'This inward/outward quest into the imagination had a literary image - the 'Wood between the Worlds', that green and fertile nexus of place and time from The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis.'