Tori McLean
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Why? What if? How come? Can I? Should I?
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The persistent questions of childhood - curious, fearless, insistent - form the foundation of Tori McLean’s interdisciplinary artistic practice. Working across print, sculpture, and installation, McLean channels this spirit of enquiry into a material-led exploration of value: how it is assigned, perceived, and felt, both personally and culturally.
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Rooted in experimentation and material curiosity, McLean’s practice draws on the joyful language of childhood play - the tactility of toys, the delight of invention, the instinct to question everything. Her works are often playful on the surface but layered with emotional complexity. Playfulness, nostalgia, and charm are used as entry points into more uncomfortable ideas and weightier subjects. The interplay between surface charm and psychological depth is a recurring strategy in her work, used to question how value is constructed and perceived.
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Her work sits at the intersection of thinking and making. Printmaking, for McLean, is not merely a method of reproduction but a dynamic, conceptual space - an active, thinking partner. She uses its textures, repetitions, and processes to reflect on themes such as identity, gendered experience, female agency, and the often-unspoken forces that shape who we are. This way of working transforms the medium from passive surface to participatory encounter, inviting viewers to challenge conventional assumptions and reflect more deeply on what they see and feel.
At the heart of her practice lies an expanded view of printmaking as object, experience, and encounter. Her work frequently moves between digital and analogue processes, embracing error, repetition, and variation to investigate the slippage between intent and outcome, voice and silence, appearance and meaning. Each shift in material or process leaves a trace - becoming part of an ongoing dialogue between intention, transformation, and meaning.
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McLean works with a broad range of materials including paper, textiles, wood, acrylic, and metal. She is particularly drawn to how form can echo emotion, how surface can suggest trauma or recovery, and how repetition might suggest ritual or endurance. Her practice often blurs boundaries between art and craft, image and object, print and sculpture, to explore how value is culturally constructed and materially expressed.
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Language plays a vital role across her work. Whether printed, carved, distorted, or obscured, words are used to probe the power of language to confine or liberate, to define identity or to challenge it. These textual interventions often carry emotional weight, reflecting on how meaning is constructed, how it can shift, and how it impacts personal and collective understanding.
Ultimately, McLean’s work is an invitation to slow down and look closer. Through the conceptual and material lens of print, she creates spaces of quiet resistance and thoughtful disruption. Rather than offering answers, her works act as provocations - inviting viewers to respond with curiosity, like a child might: open, unafraid, and ready to ask why.
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