Projects – Contemporary Art, Photography & Video Sculpture by Ian Phillips-McLaren /

Fractured Whispers / In the heart of these ancient Celtic / Atlantic rainforest’s is where the veil between the worlds is thinnest! I can almost hear the murmurs of bygone tales, resonating through the ages and igniting the imagination of bards and storytellers. Each branch tells a story, every leaf

The ‘Self’ & The ‘Other’ / This ongoing series of self-portraits explores the construction of identity through the lens of ancient Roman portraiture. Blending self-portrait photography with classical references and draws on theories of the self and the other — exploring how identity is shaped through cultural ideals, memory, and inherited visual

Pear / The pear has a multiplicity of meanings and has been used in art as a symbol as far back as the Romans on the walls of Pompeii. Gothic and Early Renaissance painters used the pear to represent marital faith but it also symbolized inner peace. In some cultures

Walk In The Woods / Walk in the Woods traces a formative moment of transition in my childhood. At ten years old, my family moved from the bustling city streets of Glasgow to the quiet expanse of the Ayrshire countryside — a dramatic shift from the familiar to the unknown.

In The Mist / In the mist, the world becomes a threshold — familiar forms blur, silence thickens, and imagination takes hold. This series follows that experience, returning to the primal emotion of stepping into the unknown for the first time. Whether in woodland, across empty fields, or along forgotten

Beyond The Edge / The inception of Beyond The Edge came about spontaneously one New Year’s morning during breakfast when a thunderstorm breezed in. I was already gearing myself up over coffee, ready to embrace whatever new creative possibilities that this New Year had in store for me. The dramatic

Self-i / The selfie is a millennial social phenomenon. Once the sole domain of teenagers, it has now permeated our culture on a grand scale — arguably distorting how we perceive ourselves and how we want to be perceived, as we turn the camera in on ourselves. In this project,

Gwen – “Did I Want To Be Here” / Gwen is a 5’6″ (1.7 m) tall 16 panel gum birchromate print and was made for ‘Squaring the Circles of Confusion: Neo-Pictorialism in the 21st Century’ exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society. “Did I Want To Be Here?” were the last