Siobhan McLaughlin is an artist and curator based in Glasgow. She graduated with First Class MA (Hons) in Fine Art at Edinburgh University in 2019 and has since been awarded the SSA Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Award at the Royal Scottish Academy and a film commission from the Tate’s British Art Network. In 2022/23, Siobhan was awarded an RSA Residencies for Scotland at Cromarty Arts Trust, the Black Isle, a Visual Art Scotland Cornwall Exchange Residency and a Stephen Palmer Travel Award.
As well as exhibiting regularly, she has curated a major private collections exhibition at Dovecot Studios for the centenary of Scottish artist Alan Davie.
Her practice combines personal experiences of walking and nature with material experimentation to create non-traditional landscape paintings. Alongside painting she uses drawing, basic weaving, printmaking and installation to explore themes of place, struggle, memory and sustainability.
She is interested in honesty in painting, allowing raw materials, thick brushmarks and exposed frayed edges to lay bare the construction of the painting. This links into her interest in the history of British landscape painting, the romanticisation and valuing of rural landscapes primarily for their aethetic value, which for centuries has led us to risk minimising the land's ecological worth. In the current, continued state of climate crisis, it is more important than ever to re-evaluate our understanding of landscapes, to represent them in paint not only as areas of beauty but as valuable and complex resources to be protected.
