Kristen McClarty
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Overview
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
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Works
Kristen McClarty
Looking for a quiet place6 layer reduction woodcut on buff coloured Kitakata - a sheer 36 gsm Japanese paper
This piece has been printed with graphite powder and ink, which gives it the look and feel of a complex pencil drawing.72 x 52 cm
Framed: Float mounted, oakEdition of 14£ 650.00McClarty's ongoing series A sense of place pays homage to the approach of Scottish artist Joan Eardley, summed up in the words "I find the more I know of the place, or of one particular spot, the more I find to paint in that particular spot. I do feel the more you know of something, the more you can get out of it, the more it gives to you." Drawing on this, McClarty's explores the rich yellow ochre of the coastal lichen covered rocks that she passes each day on her walks. These rocks feature in her woodblock prints, each piece approaching the subject from a different angle, sometimes dropping away detail, and in her latest pieces, removing the environment apart from the rock itself. In this way, McClarty feels for the edge of the subject and the space, until it is enough.McClarty's ongoing series A sense of place pays homage to the approach of Scottish artist Joan Eardley, summed up in the words "I find the more I know of the place, or of one particular spot, the more I find to paint in that particular spot. I do feel the more you know of something, the more you can get out of it, the more it gives to you." Drawing on this, McClarty's explores the rich yellow ochre of the coastal lichen covered rocks that she passes each day on her walks. These rocks feature in her woodblock prints, each piece approaching the subject from a different angle, sometimes dropping away detail, and in her latest pieces, removing the environment apart from the rock itself. In this way, McClarty feels for the edge of the subject and the space, until it is enough.38of 38Installation shots
