The Theatre of The Yellow Rock Fort
A solo exhibition by Kristen McClarty
Long Gallery: 06.08.26 - 17.09.26
Kristen McClarty, Cape Town artist and specialist printmaker, works primarily in woodcut. Her practice involves the methodical building up of information on a surface, through the act of removing material from a substrate.
Central to her current practice is a particular place along the South Atlantic Ocean shoreline. McClarty has called it, The Yellow Rock Fort. As the sun bursts over Slangkop Mountain, the spotlit Yellow Rock Fort becomes a theatre, a space for McClarty to play with shadow: forms, tenuously untethered from a body and altered by the shape and contours of the rocks.
McClarty’s practice draws on the idea that lived experience lingers in a place as residual energy, pooling or mounting up as a palimpsest on the environment. Acutely aware of how surfaces translate into print, she attempts to read the marks of this residual energy from the world around her. Some of those marks she translates to woodcut. Her shadow, a temporary celestial creature, appears in relation to those marks at The Yellow Rock Fort, and through the transmutation of its form, brings elements of that ‘text’ to life.
To engage with this materially, McClarty turns to sculpture and installation as an extension of her process. What we encounter in this exhibition are moments from her interaction with the Yellow Rock Fort translated into a tableau of elements, supporting an ongoing narrative of play.
McClarty is a member of the South African collective The Printing Girls and was elected to the Royal Society of Printmakers (UK) in 2025. McClarty exhibits widely in South Africa and the UK, and her work is held in private and public collections in South Africa and worldwide.
