My paintings are about maps, real and imagined. The cities and landscapes in my paintings come from actual places I have visited or lived in but my vision of them has been inspired by earlier painters, by cartographers, embroidery and tapestry makers, writers and filmmakers.

The Medieval world is a strong influence on my work. Medieval world maps are both atlases and encyclopaedias of things known and imagined. A particular inspiration has been the Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral; in which the Labyrinth from Greek Mythology co-exists with characters from the Bible and representations of the cities and towns of the day share the same topography as the Garden of Eden. The patterns of nature that are found in Medieval English Embroideries have been a recent source of imagery. I have also drawn medieval pilgrim and secular badges. Amongst these tiny pewter emblems are shells, a winged mermaid, a ship, a feather, a large-eyed face wearing a crown, and a figure on horseback.

William Blake saw London as a giant figure. Blake's Golgonooza is the visionary city of Art where all is:

Permanent & not lost nor vanish'd & every little act
Word, work & wish, that has existed, all remaining still.

My main purpose is to work on a large (seven by seven feet) all- encompassing painting with the working title of The Wheel of the Year, Gloucester Cathedral. To start with it will be a visual diary of my experience of the Cathedral Year. My daily practice will take into account Saints' Days and festivals of the Cathedral Calendar, points of intersection of the timeless/ with time (T.S. Eliot) as the season turn and the light changes in the Cathedral. I shall represent the community of the cathedral and try to show those who throughout history have visited worshipped and worked there and celebrate the art and architecture of the Medieval world.

There will be music and there will be silence, movement and stillness. I will paint the view from the tower... My own story will be woven with stories of others I meet on my way. I want to share my vision of harmony, of an inner calm and Beauty as a knowable reality set against a turbulent a fractured modern city.

I have begun to work in the Cathedral gradually wheeling large circular canvasses through the Nave, the Cloisters, and the North and South Transepts. Canvases, etching plates and rolls of hand made paper are beginning to show details of tracery and light, characters drawn from the panel paintings of Reynard the fox found in the vestry, patterns from tiles, leaves and crowns found in glass and stone; all details arranged within the rim of the wheel.

Painting for me records a moment's thought, a life's experience, a memory made real, a dream made real, a living map, captured energy, a note of something that might be useful later, a message for the future, a way of trying to understand the past, a mode of communicating beyond language, a world without gravity, without perspective - or perhaps with a new perspective. My paintings are ideas about the future, ways of making sense of the world, a pattern of the city, a way of life, something apocalyptic, reflections of the time during which they were made, without time, meditative, heaps of history. My paintings depict the world from above, from the centre. They show visions of animals and angels, all seasons rolled into one; things to come, many, various, near, remote, the greatest, the least, old, new, all interwoven together.

Andrea McLean, November 2001

View the Subsequent Exhibition The Flower of All Cities