Kate McLean

Ceramic Artist

Kate's works offer a meditation on connection and repetition, inviting viewers to consider how place, memory and the built environment quietly imprint themselves on material form.

Ceramic artist Kate McLean brings together clay, photography and print to create works that sit between object and image. Trained at Elam School of Fine Arts (DFA), her practice spans sculptural forms and small wearable pieces, often drawing on the details of everyday structures and screen-printed imagery.

McLean presents work shaped by her daily encounters with the domestic and industrial architecture of Auckland’s harbour edge. Cranes, sheds and telegraph poles all contribute to a visual language that filters into her ceramic forms.

Each work begins with hand-built clay, then evolves as she applies photographic transfers, printed patterns or drawn lines. These surfaces are pressed and stretched, creating a subtle tension between the organic qualities of clay and the deliberate, graphic systems layered upon it.

Kate's works offer a meditation on connection and repetition, inviting viewers to consider how place, memory and the built environment quietly imprint themselves on material form.

Ceramic artist Kate McLean brings together clay, photography and print to create works that sit between object and image. Trained at Elam School of Fine Arts (DFA), her practice spans sculptural forms and small wearable pieces, often drawing on the details of everyday structures and screen-printed imagery.

McLean presents work shaped by her daily encounters with the domestic and industrial architecture of Auckland’s harbour edge. Cranes, sheds and telegraph poles all contribute to a visual language that filters into her ceramic forms.

Each work begins with hand-built clay, then evolves as she applies photographic transfers, printed patterns or drawn lines. These surfaces are pressed and stretched, creating a subtle tension between the organic qualities of clay and the deliberate, graphic systems layered upon it.