‘Fiona’s work draws on a wide range of ideas and influences. It resonates with a sense of the divinity and mystery that ancient peoples found in nature, when they believed in the sacredness of the earth, a sacredness that the modern world is too inclined to forget.’
Christiana Payne, Professor Emerita in History of Art, Oxford Brookes University
Gallery by the Lakes is delighted to present SACRED EARTH: Water, Tree, Stone, a solo exhibition by painter-printmaker Fiona McIntyre, touring to Dorset from Nature in Art Museum.
Shaped by immersion in the wild landscapes of Scandinavia, Scotland and Northern Spain, Sacred Earth connects art, ancient language and the fragile ecologies of the North Atlantic.
The exhibition has been a labour of love, the result of a personal journey through lands connected by the North Atlantic and an attempt to consolidate the experiences attached to each landscape. The seed began in 1993 as written reflections on how ancient languages echo the physicality of place, difficult terrain, survival and fertility rites. Spiritual values were embedded in specific sites through petroglyphs, rock pigments and portals in stones. Three themes run through the work, the basic building blocks of life: water (Iceland), tree (Scotland) and stone (Galicia). Beneath them sits a subtle ecological message about the necessity of protecting these fragile places from glacial melting and erosion.
Fiona describes her materials and her way of working...
“After learning from an icon painter about the meaning and luminosity of natural pigments, I began making paint from raw minerals and earth, some of which I sourced by foraging river banks and disused mines, processing and mulling by hand. My goal is to create authentic work that connects us to our origins on this planet. Unlike synthetic paint, these natural materials communicate with a gentle, naturally harmonious frequency which many viewers experience both physically and visually.
To develop my work in the studio, I spend time walking, sketching and drawing in diverse locations to witness glaciers, pine forests and petroglyphs. These places are often difficult to get to, and the weather is unpredictable. However, this is what inspires me to feel alive and excited. I hope that the experience of being immersed like this in rain, snow, winds and sunshine will be transmitted to the viewers of my art.”
Fiona McIntyre is a founding member of the Arborealists art movement and an elected associate of the Royal Society of Printmakers (ARE). She holds degrees from Edinburgh College of Art and Grafikskolan Forum, Malmö, and an MA in European Fine Art from Winchester School of Art at its studios in Barcelona. She has exhibited internationally in more than fifty group exhibitions and solo shows, including Traces of Humanity at Gustavo Bacarisas Gallery, Gibraltar, 2026; The Quietness of Feeling: An Exploration of Trees through the Art of Benjamin Haughton and The Arborealists at Portsmouth Museum and Gallery by the Lakes, 2025; Forests, Woods and Groves at Batsford Gallery, London, 2024; Ta Kontakt at Grafiska Sällskapet, Stockholm, 2023; Dreaming the Land at the Sidney Nolan Trust, Powys, 2022; and Under the Greenwood: Picturing the British Tree at St Barbe Museum and Gallery, Lymington, 2013. Sacred Earth is her ninth solo exhibition.
A book on the series, Fiona McIntyre: Sacred Earth, with texts by Nicola Moorby and Christiana Payne, is published by Sansom & Co.
The exhibition runs from 3 to 24 October 2026.
REVIEWS
…Fiona McIntyre’s recent work demonstrates how it emerges from an unusually thoroughgoing engagement with landscapes…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…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, FAD Magazine
‘The passage of time is an absolutely key component of your art, isn’t it? Every part of your practice appears to have evolved at its own pace in a way that seems to echo the circumstances and forces that gradually shape a landscape and its cultural resonances.’
Nicola Moorby, Curator, British Art 1790–1850, Tate
