Tori McLean
Tori McLean is a UK-based interdisciplinary artist working across print, installation, and sculpture. Her practice uses the language of childhood play to explore complex questions of female value through interactive and playful works.
McLean recently graduated with an MA in Print from the Royal College of Art (2025). Her work is held in the collections of the V&A, RCA, and Hampshire Cultural Trust, as well as in private collections in Europe, the USA, and Australia. She is the recipient of the Travers Smith CSR Art Programme (2025/6) and was named one of ColourHive’s New Talent Focus: 15 Best Names to Watch (2025). Other accolades include the Designext International Grand Prize (New York), the Elle Decoration/B&Q Textile Design Award, and the Society of Designer Craftsmen Distinction Award.
McLean has exhibited with venues including Bankside Gallery, the Mall Galleries, Southwark Park Galleries, Hockney Gallery (London), and Designext (New York). Upcoming highlights include exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture (2026) and her first solo show, Pattern & Progress (2025). She has also been selected by London Art Collective for inclusion in their ArtEvol publication (2025) and shortlisted for VAA’s Art500.
Artist Statement
The curious and persistent questions of childhood—Why? What if? Can I? Should I?—form the foundation of my interdisciplinary practice. Working across print, sculpture, and installation, I channel this spirit of enquiry into a conceptually led and research-driven investigation of how female value, both personal and cultural, is shaped, constructed, and felt.
Rooted in material curiosity and process experimentation, my work draws on the language of childhood play—the tactility of toys, the joy of invention, and the instinct to question everything—to create works that invite viewer participation. I employ playfulness and nostalgia as disarming entry points into psychologically and emotionally layered ideas.
Print, in my hands, becomes an active, participatory medium—one that encourages viewers to slow down, look closer, and reflect more deeply.
My most recent work, Is This Me? Is This You? (2025), exemplifies this strategy by using interactive half-life-sized automatons to explore female identity through the neopagan triple goddess archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Combining analogue and digital print with sculpture, each figure questions societal expectations of women by asking Am I Purely Decorative? (Maiden), Do I Merely Multiply? (Mother), and Where Does My Value Lie? (Crone). These kinetic figures invite interaction via a crank handle, activating movement, music, and metaphor. Viewers become complicit in the performance, exposing power dynamics between observer and object, and prompting reflection on gender expectations, control, and worth.
Ultimately, my practice explores the often unspoken forces that shape female identity. Through this lens, I create spaces of quiet resistance, playful provocation, and thoughtful disruption—inviting viewers to engage with the curiosity of a child: open, unafraid, and ready to ask why.
https://www.torimclean.co.uk/
