“I am settled in my life in the UK, indeed I have become a British citizen, but I am also a migrant. I have been formed by the cultures of the countries I belong to,  but I am an outsider in each. I live with the ingrained awareness of the fragility of security. Everywhere, hard won civil rights, which allow people to express safely their identities and individualities, are under attack.  My work is about identity, a way to look at the  connections between the places we left behind and the place where we stand now. The need to understand these connections is universal: in societies which are transforming at an increasingly fast pace, time and distance affect us all, whether it is within or across national boundaries.

I express myself through clay. I make abstract volumes inspired by human dwellings.

Why architectural forms? Creating a safe harbour, a shelter against a hostile environment, is one of the most basic human instincts. Before the industrial revolution, buildings were made from material directly extracted from local ground. I grew up surrounded by vernacular architecture, in the safety of a solid stone house, while nearby the ruins of older structures were being slowly reclaimed by rocks and vegetation alike, blending into the landscape they originated from. Using abstract architectural structures inspired by my place of origin is a visceral form of expression. It allowed me to investigate the continuity and discontinuity between past and present generations, the sense of identity and belonging within human groups. Diving deeper, focussing my work on the relationship between structure and ground became a metaphor for our relationship to the world that sustains us: understanding our place in the natural world and our connection with our place of origin defines us and impacts how we interact with everything else, be it the environment or people.

Identity is a hugely complex subject that can be understood through many angles: biology, history, culture, traditions, religions, politics, philosophy, geography, ecology. Clay and architectural structures are my door in. My work started with something deeply personal, but it aims at raising questions and answers which are uniquely yours.”

Valerie McLean, 2023

Available Sculpture