Kristen McClarty: New Works
4 September - 31 October 2026

  • Kristen McClarty is a South African printmaker working primarily in relief, drypoint and monotype. She began working in the studio of printmaker Alma Vorster in 2016, and this quickly grew into an independent, full time practice. Her focus has since shifted toward woodblock, adopted in 2021 and now central to her work. Alongside woodcut, her studio practice includes sculpture, textile, installation and experimental film, each used to support a narrative.

    Her work traces residual energy: the unseen imprints held within water, rock, air and organic matter, a lived experience that lingers in a place, pooling or mounting up as a palimpsest on the structure of the environment. Her compositions balance abstraction and atmosphere, built through layered mark making and tactile forms.

    Process and material are central to her storytelling. Each piece carries the provenance of its making: the natural lie of the wood, the marks left by previous handlers, the texture of paper or textile, and the edge of the tools used to carve. She remains attentive throughout to what is seen and unseen, yet present, in the finished work.

  • Influenced by sea swimming and the experience of immersion, her prints evoke shifting light, fluidity and the passage of time,...

    Influenced by sea swimming and the experience of immersion, her prints evoke shifting light, fluidity and the passage of time, built through carving and repetition into work that is meditative and connected to place.

    McClarty builds bodies of work around a single idea, with exhibition as a primary objective; a piece is often shown before it is offered for sale. She has curated exhibitions at the Association for Visual Arts and StateoftheART Gallery, Cape Town; Gallery 2, Johannesburg; RK Contemporary, Riebeek Kasteel; and White River Gallery.

    In 2024, she was elected an Associate Member (ARE) of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, UK. Her woodcut Suspended Thoughts (2022) was subsequently acquired for the RE Diploma Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, her first work to enter a UK public collection.

    Her work is held in public and corporate collections including the Art Bank of South Africa (No Promises, 2022; The Dromedary and Friends, with digital artist Adam Black, 2023/24), the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers Diploma Collection (Suspended Thoughts, 2025), Iziko South African National Gallery (Trace of a Red Tide, 2025), and the Clifford Chance LLP Art Collection (Looking for a Quiet Place and Yellow Rocks from a Different Angle, 2025).

  • Installation shots
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