Exploring the significance and symbolism of medieval art and giving it a contemporary form is the theme that unites Andrea McLean’s paintings. She studies Medieval world maps and brings into her own paintings their unique spatial structures that combine past and present, fact and fiction, the universal and the minutest of details. Of the most recent work she says:

"I want to show intangible things as I imagine them to be. Things I can no longer see in the World although their traces are there. "

Over the last two years these themes have included the Abergavenny Jesse tree; a huge medieval carving of an ancestor tree that no longer exists. What does remain is the magnificent prone figure of Jesse on the floor of St. Mary’s Priory Church, the beginnings of a twisting tree trunk growing out of his side. High above, an archway frames the space, and the tree that would have occupied this space is the subject of the paintings.

At Bleddfa, the Place of the Wolf, high in the Radnorshire Forest of Wales, she worked as artist in residence, recording her perceptions of the natural visible world and the invisible world of the region’s ancient mythologies. The outcome is a synthesis of her experiences, brought together on a large rotating circular canvas fixed to robust oak wheels. Turning the wheel as she worked, slowly or fast, the painting combines finely detailed passages that reflect long concentrated sessions using small sable brushes, punctuated with fast zigzag pine plantations and bindweed loops.

Born in Wales in 1968 Andrea McLean was brought up in the Forest of Dean. She studied at Falmouth School of Art (1987-90) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1992-94) and was awarded an Abbey Major Scholarship to the British School in Rome (1994-95). She has since exhibited regularly in London and abroad and in 2003 was shortlisted for the prestigious Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy of Arts.