Siobhan McLaughlin

Siobhan McLaughlin is an artist, researcher and curator based in Glasgow. Her art practice sits between abstracted landscape and an expanded form of painting. Firmly situated in the history of experiential landscape painting, she combines personal experience with compositional devices to create a non-traditional depiction of landscape.

If you are interested in Siobhan’s work, please email all inquiries to siobhanmclaughlinstudio@gmail.com

siobhanmclaughlin.co.uk

About

Siobhan’s current work is based on drawings and photographs taken around Lochnagar in the Cairngorms which was also written about in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, 1977. Shepherd’s prose has been one of the biggest influences on her artistic practice, opening up new ways of approaching the landscape, in that ‘we should not walk up a mountain, but into them, thus exploring ourselves as well as them’. Exploring both our physical and mental capacities is therefore a prevalent theme through her work. Grappling with her art practice after a car accident, she uses the sensory experience of walking, translated into the physicality of large-scale painting to seek her place in the world. Her paintings are sown using non-traditional materials, discarded remnants of upholstery fabric or leftover dustsheets. The oil paint applied on the fabrics is driven by site-specific colours influenced by light, weather and time. The incorporation of materials has allowed her to produce works outside of the confines of the stretcher. Cut and hanging, there is a rawness in these pieces and vulnerability. This vulnerability aligns with teetering along the edge of a hill and simultaneously resonates the deterioration of our natural landscapes.

Her latest project was a commission for the British Art Network, which is jointly run by the Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art titled Landscpae in Lockdown.

Biography

After year-long courses at Glasgow School of Art and Tramway Visual Art Studio, Siobhan McLaughlin studied MA Fine Art, which combined Painting and History of Art, at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University. This 5 year course combining theory and practice. It was really beneficial to her work and developed her interest in curating.

She exhibits regularly and was awarded the SSA Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Award at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2019. Post-war Scottish Art, Sonia Delaunay's Simultanist work and opening private collections to the public have been the focus of her research to date, and she has recently been accepted into the British Art Network’s Emerging Curators Group. She is also the Curator of the centenary exhibition Alan Davie: Beginning of a far-off World at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, January-March 2021.