Sansom & co, hardback, 120 pages, £35, with contributions by Nicola Moorby, Christiana Payne and others.
This handsome account of Fiona McIntyre’s recent work demonstrates how it emerges from an unusually thoroughgoing engagement with landscapes. Cotswolds-based McIntyre was born in Nairobi, grew up in England and Ireland, and lived in Sweden for a decade. Yet her international experiences are so varied that ‘Sacred Earth’, deals with three other countries she has known long-term:
• Scotland is wood, notably the pines of Dundreggan, where McIntyre spent her childhood summers visiting her grandparents.
• Iceland is water, where she focuses on the 200 square mile, but rapidly retreating, icecap of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier. McIntyre was married to an Icelander for a decade to 1993.
• Galicia is rock, in particular the Bronze Age petroglyphs – rock carvings – found at Campo Lamiero, where north-western Spain juts into the stormy ocean. McIntyre has spent time there after finding its landscapes chime for her emotionally with those of Scotland and Iceland.
As long ago as 1993, McIntyre wrote a poem – included here – about those three comparably rugged and remote North Atlantic landscapes. It’s not just in English, but with versions in Gaelic, Icelandic and Galego, as she found that ancient languages echoed the physicality of place and enhanced the connections. ‘People probably think I’m mad’, says McIntyre, ‘but I find the challenges of working in these desolate places invigorating’. She moves from on-site sketches to studio studies to full-scale works using paints she has made herself out of mineral rock oxides, so literally building in the landscape.
The results have a primal and lyrical energy – well captured in the book, but ideally seen in McIntyre’s exhibition ‘Sacred Earth: Water, Tree, Stone’ at Nature in Art, just outside Gloucester, to 10 May. That said, the book also has its advantages: art historians Nicola Moorby and Christiana Payne delve into McIntyre’s artistic forebears and methods through an essay and interview, and other experts comment from an ecological point of view. And we go beyond McIntyre’s inspirations and technique to learn about the history of paint and how to make it: the physical act of foraging, processing and mulling minerals with a binder is an act of reverence to the earth that feeds into the paintings.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD.
