Made From Bed

Made From Bed

Made From Bed is a lifelong and foundational strand of McLachlan’s practice.

Born Disabled and living with long-term health conditions, McLachlan’s education, creative development, and artistic language were formed largely through bed based and home based working. Extended periods of illness, meant that formal education and art school were inaccessible. Instead, knowledge, technique, and critical thinking were developed through self-directed study, experimentation, and internal and community based learning.

This body of work brings together abstract paintings, photographs, collages, and films made over many years within conditions of restriction - often from a single space, and frequently from bed. Rather than positioning this as a limitation, McLachlan treats the bed as a legitimate and generative studio space: a site of observation, care, resistance, and sustained creative labour.

Within Made From Bed, care, pacing, and embodied knowledge shape both process and outcome. The works engage abstraction, repetition, texture, and stillness, reflecting the physical and temporal conditions in which they were made. The practice challenges dominant assumptions about productivity, professionalism, and where “serious” art is expected to take place, asserting that rigour and excellence are not dependent on institutional access or traditional studio environments.

Made From Bed also reflects a broader commitment to accessibility and disability justice. It foregrounds high-quality artistic work created through home-based practice and insists on its value within contemporary visual culture. This strand of McLachlan’s practice informs her wider curatorial thinking, including digital-first approaches that imagine online spaces as calm, accessible, and analogue-feeling environments.

Through documentation, reflection, and shared experience, Made From Bed creates recognition, value, and connection - particularly for Disabled artists whose practices are shaped by illness, rest, and home based working. It stands not as an exception within McLachlan’s practice, but as its foundation.