Kristen McClarty

Kristen McClarty is a South African printmaker based in Kommetjie, just outside Cape Town, whose practice centres on relief and monotype printmaking.

McClarty’s focus gradually shifted towards relief printmaking, drypoint intaglio, monotype, and, since 2021, woodblock — a medium she describes as having become her true artistic home.

Deeply informed by materiality and process, her work explores the traces left behind by lived experience within the natural world.

Working primarily with woodblock, McClarty investigates the idea of residual energy — the unseen imprints held within surfaces such as water, rock, air, and organic matter. Her compositions balance abstraction and atmosphere, capturing movement, texture, and the quiet rhythms of nature through layered mark-making and tactile forms.

Influenced by the physicality of sea swimming and the sensory experience of immersion, her works evoke shifting light, fluidity, and the passage of time. Through carving and repetition, McClarty creates prints that feel both meditative and deeply connected to place.

In 2024, McClarty was elected as an Associate Member (ARE) of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE Printmakers, UK), recognising her contribution to contemporary printmaking on an international stage. Her woodcut Suspended Thoughts (2022) was subsequently acquired for the RE Diploma Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, marking her first work to enter a UK public collection.

Circle is proud to present McClarty’s work as part of its programme supporting contemporary artists working across print and material-led practices.

Studio: Kommetjie, South Africa