The works in Sacred Earth are the result of a personal journey through lands connected by the North Atlantic and the artist's attempt to consolidate experiences attached to each landscape. The seed for this artwork began in 1993 in the form of the written word and the realisation that ancient languages echo the physicality of place, the intensity of navigating difficult terrain, survival and fertility rites. Profound spiritual values were attached to specific locations in the form of petroglyphs, pigments painted onto rocks and the concept of portals in stones, water and trees to communicate with the dead. This inspired a journey into understanding why artists choose particular media. A chance encounter with a Viking Age Danish Conservator of burial items was a revelation. Her analysis found that early Scandinavians had access to bright exotic pigments. This inspired McIntyre to discover more about the modern materials she was using and go further back in time to cave paintings, Ancient Greece and the Renaissance. McIntyre's journey took her to an icon painter who explained the significance of mineral pigments in the making of sacred paintings and how colours symbolise meaning similar to language. He explained how the unique shapes of pigment particles resonate and give off light differently to modern uniform paint. McIntyre began making paint from mineral and earth pigments, some of which she sources herself. The physical act of foraging, processing and mulling with a binder is an act of reverence to the earth. Painting with it takes it to another level. Once separated from the intentions of the artist the observer develops a new personal relationship literally connecting to the stuff of nature transmuted into art. Her goal is to make authentic work that connects us all to our origins on this planet. AUTHORS: Nicola Moorby is an art historian and curator specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with particular interest in landscape, watercolour and historic techniques and materials. As a researcher at Tate she contributed to two major online publications: The Camden Town Group in Context, and J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, and has numerous other publishing credits. She is the author of Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape (Yale University Press 2025) and co-editor and author of How to Paint Like Turner (Tate Publishing 2010). An Art Society accredited lecturer she also teaches for the Short Courses department of the Courtauld Institute of Art and has appeared as an expert on television and radio. She will be interviewing McIntyre to explore her contemporary use of pigments and techniques, and the influences that have inspired her practise. Christiana Payne is Professor Emerita of History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. She has published widely on British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including on Samuel Palmer and William Blake. Her books include Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England 1780-1890 (Yale University Press, 1993), Where the Sea meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-century Britain (Sansom and Company, 2007), John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter (Yale University Press, 2010) and Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870 (Sansom and Company, 2017).
