Andrea McLean
- Faculty
Biography
Andrea McLean studied fine art at Falmouth School of Art and postgraduate painting at The Slade School of Art where she won an Abbey Scholarship year to the British School at Rome. She has had solo exhibitions in London, Bleddfa, Abergavenny and Great Torrington in Devon. She was Gloucester Cathedral's Artist in Residence for a year and her group exhibitions include The Edge of Printing, Royal Academy Keeper's House; Drawing Breath, Jerwood Prize touring exhibition; Flashback, Art Space Gallery, London; and Mapping Inspirations, Hereford Cathedral. Andrea features in the book Paintings and Confessions by Tess Jaray RA. She has created a Golgonooza Map for the Blake Society and continues to make drawings and paintings about medieval maps and dream mythology in her studio in Ledbury, Herefordshire. Andrea’s circular Mappa Mundi painting is in the British Library’s collection on display near the Map Room.
On drawing
Drawing can be a way of mapping. The brush, pencil, pen and ink can become pathways, waterways, boundaries and stories that can become, in time, something cosmological. Drawing as mapping can be very much in the moment but it can also be a tracing of the templates seen in historic maps, imagery in medieval maps and a place for symbols found in daily life and dream life. Drawing can make a sketchbook into an atlas of the imagination
