Andrea McLean
- Faculty
Biography
Andrea lives in Ledbury, Herefordshire. She studied Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade, after which she held an Abbey Scholarship at the British School at Rome. She works in ecclesiastical settings, including a year as artist-in-residence at Gloucester Cathedral, and her Mappa Mundi painting is in the British Library Collection, on the third floor outside the Map Room. Recently, she has been an invited speaker on Research in Art Practice at Middlesex University, and on William Blake at the Pari Centre, Tuscany. She has drawings in Towner Eastbourne’s Drawing the Unspeakable exhibition and is to be resident artist at the National Trust Hafod Estate.
On drawing
If I begin a drawing without thinking, it feels like I am making an imaginary city plan. I start just off centre. Walls and rooftops outline. They stack upwards and outwards. Doorways, windows, streets, paths, steps and ladders connect spaces. Trees grow, the overall shape of them more rounded than the buildings are. Then, I remember that I have artwork-maker’s freedom. This is a world without gravity where the weight of a stone is no heavier than air or water. The imaginary anything can flicker into view like flames.
The drawing page can also be an artefact, diagram or map. Its shape can be circular, square, or any other shape without and within.
Drawings can be bridges. They find images — images of the bigger picture: Cosmography. They are Arks, shields, and ocean charts. They have zones enfolding and unfurling. They are ways for pilgrimage, adventure, and encounter.
