Yolanda McKean

Yolanda McKean

Yolanda’s work incorporates various drawing, printing and painting techniques. The images are mostly of familiar spaces or objects, exploring dreams, ideas of ecology and femininity. The work over the years has been autobiographical, considering relationships and spirituality. She has started to incorporate poetry into her work, exploring how we heal and grieve through poetry and drawing.

She was selected for Platform 2018 at the Edinburgh Art Festival and for solo and group shows in the UK and Spain. She is currently artist/gardener in residence at Abbeyhill Primary School. The residency will be the first in a series of intergenerational environmental art and science projects.

For Yolanda, drawing from imagination and from life are ways of thinking about the world through observing what we see and what we feel. Yolanda’s work uses drawing to gather information from the world, often working from life, exploring complex spaces and textures which are then used to create paintings later in the studio.

More recently she has been working on a project about Tenerife, in particular the ways humans interact with the island’s trees and flora. Many of her drawings focus on familiar spaces such as domestic scenes and the way the wilderness interacts with the inside human spaces.

Yolanda uses drawing to meditate on sensory encounters with the world, to explore and manage human emotions such as grief and loss, not only in a personal