Ian Phillips-McLaren is a British artist whose interdisciplinary practice begins with photography but extends across historical printing processes, painting, sound, installation and collected materials. His work explores the relationship between place, memory, perception and reality, asking whether a photograph is less a representation of the world than evidence of an encounter with it.
Born and raised in Glasgow, Phillips-McLaren began photographing in 1985. In 1990 he was the subject of the BBC educational documentary A Style of One’s Own. That same year he was Artist in Residence at the Glasgow School of Art, where he taught photography and darkroom practice, and exhibited work as part of Glasgow’s European City of Culture programme.
After relocating to London in 1992, he established a successful commercial photography practice spanning more than three decades. His portrait subjects have included Justin Timberlake, Billy Connolly, Dame Vera Lynn, Belinda Carlisle, Helen Sharman and Orlando Bloom, while clients have included American Vogue, GQ, The Sunday Times Magazine, the BBC, EMI and Polydor.
In 2016 his practice shifted decisively towards research-led fine art. Historical photographic processes, particularly gum bichromate, became central to an enquiry concerned not with nostalgia, but with the material nature of photography itself and the relationship between process, place and perception.
His gum bichromate print Gwen, “Did I Want To Be Here”? created over seven months, was exhibited in the Royal Photographic Society’s Squaring the Circle exhibition. In 2024 he was the only UK artist selected for Top 20: Gum Bichromate Photographers Worldwide at the Daniel Miller Gallery in Los Angeles. His work has also received multiple Honourable Mentions from the International Photography Awards and recognition from the International Colour Awards.
Phillips-McLaren later completed an MA in Fine Art at Cambridge School of Art, expanding his practice beyond the photographic print to include painting, sculpture, moving image, sound and installation. Influenced by Jungian psychology, phenomenology and contemporary ideas surrounding perception, his current research investigates what photographs preserve, what they leave behind, and how the world continues beyond the edges of the image.
Rather than treating photographs as representations of reality, Phillips-McLaren approaches them as traces of encounters between people and place. Through walking, field recordings, mapping, historical processes and collected materials, his work investigates the photograph as both object and evidence. The photograph becomes less an endpoint than the beginning of a wider investigation into what a photograph can and cannot hold.
Alongside his studio practice, Phillips-McLaren teaches photography and fine art at Cambridge School of Art and London Metropolitan University, and offers specialist mentoring and workshops in analogue and hybrid photographic practice.
→ Learn more about Mentoring
→ View upcoming Workshops
👉 Read selected testimonials from artists, curators, and press
→ Voices on Ian’s Work
Education
MA Fine Art, Cambridge School of Art, ARU University, Cambridge.
My Motif: Skull and Crown
“The crowned skull is a reminder that knowledge outlives us—and that wisdom, once earned, is meant to be shared. It speaks not of darkness, but of transformation, insight, and the responsibility to pass things on.”
Ian Phillips-McLaren
