Flora Mclachlan

Participating in The Land as Other

This series of work was made after a residency at Stiwdio Maelor in Corris. I lived in the village as a stranger and found myself speculating about stories and myths of the area. I decided to dream some imaginary histories into being by responding to the unknown land around me. It is interesting that as an English person living in Wales, I constantly feel this sense of estrangement with the land - I love it but know I am not of it. I am listening to local stories but also creating my own engagements with the land in an attempt to root myself.

I began each image by flowing lithographic tusche across the litho stone in random patterns, which I then drew into, using the found shapes within as they resonated with places around Corris.

Intersecting loosely with the stories of ‘The Goose Girl’, ‘The Wild Swans’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, permeated as they are by an atavistic sense of female magics these lithographs speak of the power of blood, and of weaving plants, and shapeshifting in and out of stories. The village of Corris appears in the background as smoking chimneys and satellite dishes glimpsed from the dark edge lands, the tangled wet woods, and the green goosegrass-sticky riverbed, where things change state and become enchanted.

They are usually installed unframed, pinned to the wall like specimens to imply their aliveness, to suggest that they could flutter away again, and to express the flow, mutability and fecund nature of image-making.