Ian Phillips-McLaren
Ian Phillips-McLaren, Artist & Photographer
Ian Phillips-McLaren is a British multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, painting, sculpture, sound, and installation. Working across mediums, he explores the layered relationships between memory, myth, and materiality, often drawing on Jungian psychology, archetypes, and symbolic motifs such as the snake, the crown, and the key.
His projects often merge historic photographic processes—gum bichromate, cyanotype, and salt printing—with painterly interventions, erasures, and textures, creating hybrid works that blur boundaries between image and object. Installations frequently combine visual, sonic, and sculptural elements, producing immersive environments that echo themes of mortality, transformation, and the fragility of existence.
Recent works include Fractured Whispers, which reflects on the endangered Celtic rainforests of Scotland through foraged pigments and layered imagery, and A Moment’s Existence, a series of paintings and photographs that meditate on identity, mortality, and transformation through fragmented figures and mythic archetypes. Earlier projects such as Self – I and The Self & The Other examine portraiture, identity, and the shifting space between self and other.
His work engages deeply with questions of presence, loss, and renewal. By combining photography’s capacity to record with painting and sound’s ability to evoke the intangible, Phillips-McLaren creates art that lingers between the material and the spectral—a “digital ghost” of memory, myth, and being.
Artist Statement
“My practice is shaped by the tension between permanence and transience. I use alternative photographic processes not out of nostalgia but as a way of slowing down image-making, allowing chance, material imperfection, and layered time to enter the work.
Jung’s ideas of shadow, archetype, and individuation inform much of what I do: figures emerge fragmented, half-remembered, or dissolving. Symbols—snakes, keys, fractured crowns—recur as emblems of transformation, danger, and renewal.
By working across mediums—photography, painting, installation, sound—I try to create images and environments that feel both intimate and mythic, rooted in ancient archetypes yet open to contemporary anxieties. For me, art is less about offering answers than about holding space for uncertainty, for presence, and for the fragile beauty of a moment’s existence.”
Workshops
Alongside his artistic practice, Ian also runs workshops and one-to-one mentoring in alternative photographic processes, including gum bichromate, cyanotype, and salt printing. Sessions are held at his Hackney, London studio, with all materials provided.
