Flora McLachlan

My work grows out of the experience of observing the landscape and the process of translating this experience into print. As I work on my pictures, I want to evoke a single charmed moment out of time, a magical vision that stills. The scene is our ancient and enchanted landscape, roamed by guardian spirit-like animals, shadowed by woods where the holly springs green amongst the bare oaks and beeches. 

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I am inspired by the fairy tales I grew up reading, and by the motif of the quest in the medieval romance poetry I read during my English degree. I see it as a venturing outwards and also inwards, entering the wild unruly forest of trees and thorns, searching for a transforming glimpse of the white hart. 

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For me etching is a slow and reflective process. The image moves through many stages of biting in the mordant, as I add layers of line, texture, shadow and meaning, watching the image slowly become itself. I want the image to look like a weathered relic from the distant past, briefly come alive for us to see.

Etching is the ideal medium for my purpose, with its mysterious blacks and glowing, darkened whites. Working the metal plate to make it show delicate watercolour washes or deep dark gouged marks is endlessly fascinating. 

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.

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I also make lithographs, drawing freely with crayons, pen and wash onto the lithographic limestone which I process with gum arabic and nitric acid to chemically fix the drawing into the stone and allow it to be repeatedly inked and printed. Lithography gives a painterly immediacy. It's such a direct and spontaneous approach to making an image and I find it complements etching really well. As it is such a fluid medium I am experimenting with printing the image as a changing series, developing the drawing with additions and subtractions through many states. I enjoy seeing the image accrue textures and tones; a palimpsest of thoughts building up. I add to this by overprinting layers drawn on different stones.

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My print workshop lies under the shadow of the Preseli hills. I print my own work on my large and small Rochat etching presses.

I also have two direct lithographic presses and a large collection of stones. 

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