The The Flower of All Cities is an exhibition of paintings and etchings by Andrea McLean produced during 2001 and 2002 when she was Artist-in-Residence at Gloucester Cathedral. As an artist fascinated by the medieval period, and medieval maps in particular, the appointment of Andrea McLean for this year long residency was an inspired one.

Drawing and studying the work of early cartographers, weavers and craftsmen, Andrea McLean has evolved and developed into contemporary form some of the ideas and symbolism inherent in the maps of the Middle Ages. Sometimes vast and sometimes tiny, her paintings, drawings and etchings are a combination of observed and imagined features of particular places that she has visited or lived in. Building up the surface of her work with a myriad of intricate scattered images such as stars, animals, rivers, seas and other geographical features they take the form of a modern-day Mappa Mundi or a painting by Lorenzetti or Breugal, all of which she readily admits a debt to.

At Gloucester Cathedral Andrea has spent the year drawing and painting in the nave, the cloisters and in the Lady Chapel making paintings that are full of intricate detail drawn from the Cathedral architecture. There are stone flowers, dark outlines of tracery, rearranged medieval stained glass and there are quatrefoil and trefoil shapes arranged as objects and events that float free in a world without gravity. Images of mythology and legend, biblical events and carved masonry are portrayed on huge canvases and small etchings alike as a contemporary response to the architecture and symbolism of a medieval institution.

The largest painting that has been produced, and the painting that brings together all of the threads of McLeans work, is The Wheel of the Year. A round painting, 2 metres in diameter, that represents a map or a diary of the ecclesiastical year, which can be turned by the viewer as a slow moving Wheel of Fortune in exactly the same way that certain medieval wheel maps were made to be rotated by the clergy in acknowledgement of the passage of time.