Artists directory

Fiona

McLachlan Powell

Disciplines: Sculpture

Materials: Assemblage, Casting, Embroidery, Paper, Pen & Ink, Pencil, Stitched, Woven
Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art with a Combined Studies Degree I have been a studio holder at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. I grew up in a farm working family. The rhythm of the days and seasons and patterns of life necessitating improvisations has influenced my work and my way of working. My work explores thresholds and systems both real and imagined. I draw on elements of memory, traces of human presence in a place trying to uncover different possibilities in the present from examining the past. I make installation structures and sculptures around these ideas. Their forms are a starting point for drawings of imagined natural or human systems where I speculate on the coexistence of nature and humanity, their thresholds and boundaries. I hope to give a sense of how we lived and live now. Recently this has taken the form of my Bondagers installation for the Whiteadder Valley Heart of the Lammermuirs Festival, Summer 2020. Before lockdown I worked with archaeologists and community groups in situ excavating sites in the Whiteadder Valley where we shared knowledge and insights into the walking the ground, uncovering and analysing its use and imaginative responses to this. Often the materials I use are natural and their beginnings are in nature. Examples are muslin, hessian, twine, bamboo, straw, recycled fabrics, linen thread. They are transformed by coiling, binding, twisting stitching, painting and drawing all with a view that these often fragile materials can be made into objects that have stability and strength.

Previous Experience

2024 —- ‘Now and then’ Visual Arts Scotland (VAS) at Dalkeith Palace 2024 —-Threads SSA (Society of Scottish Artists ) at Old Gala House, Galashiels 2023 —- Sick Artists Club exhibition “things I have learned the hard way” for Lizzy Rose 2022 —- Subsets, Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh with Mary May, Colleen Thompson & OOR_Scintilla 2021 —– Worldwide Exhibition, Stable Gallery, Hampshire 2020 —– Not going back to normal, Collective Gallery Edinburgh 2020 —– Bondagers, Whiteadder: Heart of the Lammermuirs Festival 2019 —— Studio Holders Presentation, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop street level window Exhibition 2019 ——Kirtle, Saltaire Arts Trail house exhibitor, muslin & hessian kirtles, gloves

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