Sally McLaren RE Retrospective: A Passion for Printmaking
Original intaglio etchings 1959 – present
14 March – 2 May 2026
We celebrate the remarkable printmaking of Sally McLaren in a solo selling show that fills the timber-framed galleries at Sladers Yard Gallery with glorious works from throughout her career.
Distinguished printmaker, painter and etcher Sally McLaren was born in London, studied at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and at the Central School of Art in London. She won a scholarship to study in Paris at the famous Atelier 17 of Stanley William Hayter, returning to teach at Goldsmith’s College of Art. She is a Fellow and Founder Member of the Printmaker’s Council of Great Britain, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers now known as the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers (RE). She has exhibited widely and her work is held in numerous collections around the world, including the National Print Collection, the V&A Museum, the Government Art Collection, the Scottish Arts Council, the Museum of Modern Art in Macedonia, the Cabo Frio Print Collection in Sao Paulo and the New York Public Library. In recent years, two monographs of her work have been published, The Response of Landscape and In Search of Stillness, which is in the collection of the National Art Library at the V&A, and is available in soft or hardback boxed editions at the exhibition. Sally McLaren lives and continues to work in Wiltshire.
Now in her 90th year and producing large, joyous, youthful carborundum prints, Sally’s unique artistic voice sings out even from the first prints she made while studying at the Central School of Art, London, in the late 1950s. Her first ever untitled black and white etching showed in that year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and we have almost all the key works which marked turning points in her career since then.
Immensely knowledgeable and technically adept, Sally has always drawn inspiration from the natural world and landscape. Her experimental approach has taken her through different periods and styles through the decades, exploding in the fabulously colourful freewheeling work she is producing now in collaboration with master-printmaker Andrew Smith.
Biography:
Sally McLaren was born in 1936 and lived in India for her first three years. In 1939 Sally, her mother and brother returned to live in Somerset near to her grandparents. Later they moved to East Knoyle where Sally and her husband still live in her childhood home. Sally’s father was killed in action in Burma in 1942. Sally was educated by her mother until she was 10. Then followed two years locally as a day girl at a local convent. Missing artistic stimulation, she left to board at a small and wonderfully creative school called Langford Grove in Sussex. At home her stepfather Stephen Scammell used to take them camping on the Dorset coast. ‘I was immersed in beautiful landscapes,’ she recalls, a deep connection which would continue throughout her life.
‘I want to feel the wind in the trees, the spray beside the seaside, the heat on the beach, the glistening white of the cliffs. It’s those feelings that I particularly relate to, an enjoyment of freedom, liberty and warmth.’ SMcL
She studied Architectural Draughtsmanship by correspondence course and attended part time at Salisbury Art School and then the History of Italian Art and Literature in Italian at the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy. In 1956 she went to the Ruskin School of Art which was then housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. There she received a thorough traditional formal schooling. Alone for the first time in Oxford, she started painting sets for university theatre productions which introduced her to David Webster (her husband to be), Ken Loach, Patrick Garland, John McGrath, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and many others.
Three years later she started at the Central School of Art in London and quickly found her place in etching and painting. There, Anthony Harrison and Merlyn Evans taught her every technique of intaglio – from dry point and line work, stopping out and deep etch methods using acids, etching away different levels for soft and hard rollers as well as techniques with aquatint, and drawing on hard and soft grounds. ‘Tony Harrison opened the whole avenue of etching to me and I completely fell in love with this process.’
The Central encouraged her to push away the barriers she had been taught at the Ruskin to be free with whatever medium she was using. ‘I was beginning to feel that I was developing my own style. In taking a detail away… I would create a more abstract image – a less conventional image that somehow allowed it to breathe.’ And with that, in 1960 she began to exhibit, with the Royal Society of British Artists, The RA Summer Exhibition, and the Zwemmer Gallery where her etching was bought by the New York Public Library. In 1961 she was elected Associate of the Royal Society of Painter Etchers.
On the strength of a portfolio of etchings including City (1962), she won a scholarship for a year at the famous Atelier 17 run by Stanley William Hayter in Paris. There she was expected to start again from scratch using only Hayter’s methods, even though she had already learned all these techniques at the Central. Again, she was being taught rules she would have to push away. She did this on her return by cutting up her plates and printing from them in segments. A position teaching at Goldsmiths gave her an income and also kept her in contact with professional artists. She continued at Goldsmiths after she married David Webster until she became pregnant in 1965.
Juggling motherhood of three boys with her work, she found walking was the key – as it has remained ever since. ‘I seek out places that are empty and have huge expanses of space. As I allow these in, immediately a sense of quiet and stillness arrives. I don’t paint place. I paint an atmosphere, which comes from absorption, of being in that place.’ ‘My work is to try to depict the beauty of landscape, its shapes and forms and inescapable history.’
In 1996, Sally began working with master printmakers Jack Shirreff and Andrew Smith at 107 Workshop. Jack and Andrew always encouraged her to make ambitious, radical work with utter freedom. Latterly she has continued to work with Andrew now at Andrew’s Printworks in Poole. Her work has blossomed with their support. She and David moved into her mother’s house at East Knoyle in 2006 and, when she was 70, they converted an old bus garage into a wonderful studio.
Her work breathes with a radical spaciousness. ‘When I walk across the fields I rebalance, I come back to the core of myself from which I think everything stems. It removes any confusion and simplifies my outlook… I will continue to do what I can to show what is beautiful.’
Sladers Yard Contemporary Art & Craft Gallery, CAFÉ SLADERS, West Bay, Bridport Dorset DT6 4EL
Open Wednesday to Saturday 10am – 4.30pm. t: 01308 459511 gallery@sladersyard.co.uk sladersyard.co.uk