Hi Alex,
I just wanted to let you know how delighted we are with your work enhancing our home!!!
A home is a place where people live and are loved. A place where friends and family come and go. A place where memories are made – lives are interwoven creating memories. Celebrations are enjoyed – losses are grieved. People come together – sometimes for lengthy periods – sometimes for brief encounters.
We have lived in our current home for 30 years – and have seen many changes – to those we love and to those we care for. We have lost some family members and gained new ones.
Your artwork reflects to me the shifting and changing of those we share our lives with. Beyond and Between is symbolic of those who we touch in life – the people we meet and connect with. Some people stay with us for only a short time – but can be hugely influential – some stay with us for a lifetime – and share our journey through life’s shifting sands.
The life forms in your work are the precious people we have who come and go in the busy world in which we live – they may only be with us for a brief moment – perhaps they are gone before we fully appreciate the contribution they make to our world.
I simply adore them!!
Julie Roughan, 11.10.12.
Owner of Beyond Between and Just Passing.
Alex McIntyre’s sculptures (a related pair) are among my most precious possessions and go on changing in the ways in which they are so special. They develop day by day, continuing to delight and refresh – confirming the best of what is brought to them and suggesting new perspectives. While yielding tactile, visual and spatial pleasure, they have a significant spiritual resonance.
I am the organist of a large fifteenth century gothic church and Alex responded both to architecture and to music in this commission. Identifying Bach as my main musical focus, I gave her a recording of ‘The Art of Fugue’ rather than inflicting my playing upon her; the church fabric itself spoke more immediately.
Alex created two abstract figures in alabaster (her inspired choice of material) and these reflect the vertical lines of the church, reaching upwards, and also – as I feel them – embody the shapes of listening ears and of how we tend to envisage angels. What she has done is what Eliot did in the ‘Four Quartets’ – to reimagine, to recreate, traditional cultural and religious perceptions in her own language as a sculptor and from an objective though sympathetic distance. As I see it, it is what Messaien does in ‘La Nativite,’ with the sight and spaces of the French Alps translated into intimations of eternity in music, aural metaphors for the beyond.
The interaction between the two is intensely dynamic (in case the above sounds like too much Anglo-Catholic apology….) and it is most rewarding to rearrange the relationship fairly regularly and experience what is then generated. One of Alex’s many achievements is to make all this possible in the context of a very small country cottage. The work is forgiving and adaptable, without losing any of its power.
To me, the whole piece seems to offer an exploration of many varieties of what it means to be human, as well as taking account of the initial coordinates. If one took the tremendous liberty of personifying (and thus reducing) the two figures, one would say that they read ‘The Guardian’ – they can tease and challenge as well as support and celebrate. Fine by me!
I look forward to commissioning something else from Alex, possibly something smaller for my desk or possibly something for the garden. I know they would be as wonderful as what she has done and elicit the same qualities of attention.