ISBN: 978-1-3999-2432-0 / Authors: David Ferry, Antony Mottershead / Publisher: Sacred Earth Publishing for the Sidney Nolan Trust/ Pages: 47 / Softback / Full colour

With this catalogue, David Ferry RE, Emeritus Professor of Printmaking and Books Arts at Cardiff Metropolitan University, and President of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers, London writes an insightful essay on the more than 40 works produced by the artist during a six month residency at The Rodd. This was a dedicated response to Nolan’s legacy as one of Australia’s foremost painter-printmakers and poet and she was given unfettered access to his private collection of objects as well as navigating her way through the surrounding landscape, and Nolan’s extensive library of books.

“…Fiona McIntyre (1963-) reciprocate of the Sidney Nolan Trust Residency in 2021-2, has clearly caught some of the draught of the magical Hindwell wind, and sited herself purposefully, or should this also read, intuitively in that immediate landscape. She manoeuvred herself across the whole grid of The Rodd during the course of her recent residency, and in all seasons and weather conditions. Stealth and ingenuity fit hand in glove, or in the painter’s vocabulary the paint and the brush! At the core of Nash’s, Nolan’s and McIntyre’s deep creative nose-dives into the character of places originates a distinct Neo-Romantic inclination to discern in natural backgrounds, the symbolic equivalent of ‘inner states’.

McIntyre’s industry as a painter is also one that seeks to discover further than an immediate site-line. This is very evident in her works, particularly in the essential balances and checks she makes throughout her creative process. She experiences first hand the actual nature of the outside; the cold, the heat, the growing, the sounds, and on the other hand, the more ‘hidden histories’ that shape this maelstrom or cacophony of immediate visual ‘stuff’ and thus exposes the very ‘atmosphere’ that allows a different assembly of all manner of disconnected elements.

The construct of en plein air is in her case not simply a term meaning to work/paint/draw in the landscape, it also has to mean thinking/assimilating/understanding in the landscape as well. It is an art that at times demonstrates an important balance between ‘recording’ and ‘interpreting’. It is a difficult act to advocate. It requires immediacy and reflection in the same millisecond. It is a remarkable human tightrope of holding on to ‘a thought’, and relaying that reaction or instantaneous thinking, as a physical visual element.

There were times during McIntyre’s creative adventures over The Rodd landscape that the sheer brutal cold of the winter just got too much for her to bear. This is exactly what happens when challenging conditions overwhelm the ‘artist explorer’. She was having to be forced back to ‘base camp’, and this was in itself an important factor in the grander assimilation of The Rodd and its vast histories. It was at times just like these, that McIntyre drew from objects in the warmer sanctuary of Rodd Court. The fact that these objects were collected and owned by Nolan is important. For objects can also release the ‘force of otherness’, transmitting an inner signal to the observer and the collector. Nolan gathered objects for a creative and inspirational purpose more than for simply amassing a collection. The bones and skulls of creatures or anthropomorphic antiquities eventually found a home in Nolan’s oeuvre; likewise Nash was reputed to have dragged a giant tree stump back to his studio. The brutal winter forced McIntyre to reconsider her experience of the ‘outside’ into what has wonderfully become an illuminated amalgam of The Rodd through her ‘thinking eyes’…"

£15.00 + P & P