Us humans, we use lots of words to communicate, we create written language to impart understanding and to make meaning. We do a lot of talking and yet I don’t believe this is the most direct way of communicating. Words don’t always bring us to truth in the way that other modes of communication do. Is it possible that there are lost forms of human communication?
Do words come from the place that our truest self lies? By the time the matter rises to leave our mouths it has already gone through a myriad of filtering systems before washing up on the surface, diluted and softened for the palate and its outcome: words. We also communicate with our bodies, in the way we hold ourselves, move our eyes, frame our mouths. How we touch one another or cradle ourselves when no one else is watching or how we push through the sea in slow motion when we are alone out there. Perhaps here we are getting closer to truth. Yet still I am not able to make my point with words.
Other parts of nature communicate with movement, sound, energy and vibrations that travel and send complex messages. It is likely that they are sharing information with one another in subliminal ways that we cannot yet detect and I hope for their sake we never can.
A silent television show plays in the background, I think of silent films or watching a scene play out behind glass in real time or a painting where you are only shown the back of the canvas; paint seeps through, written words in reverse, their legibility irrelevant. We tend to understand through the connectedness of being human. Perhaps we could do away with words to give way for a deeper understanding of each other without a language that perhaps we created to disguise how much we really feel. We have reduced ourselves merely to words. Or perhaps I’m giving too much credit to the depths of the human species.
Tara McIntosh makes work that says only what is needed. There is no central point to hold onto (air), no narrative to pin it down (breath), no determined place for it to take us (sky). Like a patch on the ground we stare at while we wait when we don’t have a phone in our hands. It takes us into a space where we are emptied and moved to another place where words have no use. We may as well blur them out for they only confuse what is really going on here. That is the power of these paintings, pictures, images, objects, I don’t know what to call them, I am unable to place words on anything.
Tara’s work compels us to slow down, to leave all other stimulus at the door, to re enter the manual and the analogue. Out of modernity we arrive at jute, tools and labour, leading us to a place we long to be in. Was life once simpler? Has human existence pushed into the senseless? In Tara’s ‘things’ her gestures leave little trace of human intervention, a series of considered accidents, conscious of the delicate nature of such things. Effortless and never with hesitation.
Fragility, on the edge of falling apart, hovering in a state of decay, binded by its thoughtfulness. She doesn’t allow us to hold onto anything too firmly for it will only slip away, we slip away, with only our feet to hold us down. There is a sense of longing in these pieces, a pushing and a pulling towards other places or back to where we once stood. Are we ever just where we are? Is our ability to travel without leaving something we should be paying attention to?
She signals us to pay attention to what we cannot see, spaces that fall into other spaces delineated occasionally by a lead pencil line or a brush of an orbital sander or the nick of an angle grinder on a soft surface, like skin. It is not only these interventions that we are called to focus on but equally so we switch to see the eternity between her actions, the emptiness as the positive, the mysteriousness of dark matter. Suddenly our attention flips and a whole universe is revealed to us, again. What message is she sending us here? Is the message we each receive the same? And yet no words passed between us.
I think I have said too much
Lottie Consalvo 2025
The scaffold that renders a memory of a place lies in the profundity of their subtle details. The habitual presence of the small things, objects and forms, their textures, lightness, smells and sounds; how you felt in that moment, the gestalt of it, the inner search for meaning along a trace in your line of sight. A place leaves indelible marks, our bodies hold them, yet in our imagination their memories breathe new forms, collapsing time. This is the experience I have gazing upon the minimal paintings of Tara McIntosh. They embody a slow but powerful attention to place – or in this instance two places – skilfully transcribing these quiet phenomena, embedding them into the painting's materiality.
Tara’s latest body of work can be understood as a felt memoir: two places, two points in time, in quiet conversation. Time is archived through her body in dialogue with place, the studio becoming both setting and substance – dust, pencil and pen marks, paint splattered and absorbed, sun-bleached lines, emptied space, a hard edge, a tear. The works from her home carry a certain lightness – expanses of negative space are gently pierced by incidental marks steadying the gaze in its search. Structured lines and delicate gestures create a framework that makes the image feel grounded and gently held. In contrast, the pieces born from her Parisian residency are active, almost restless, brooding. Hessian upholstered into and over the frame, bleeding beyond their frayed edges – unravelling, free. She paints these gestural, almost colourfield-like abstractions with a flare of curiosity – liberty even – sensing a rupture one experiences by the ambience of a new place.
Tara’s restraint of total representation excites the imagination. Not the kind of imagination that is conjured from our eyes, but is felt in our bodies. An ineffable experience at first. Each trace of these places are exalted, then severed, neatly contained by the consideration of the frame - a quiet decree: here is where the place ends, and the memory begins. I have no memory of these places, but her paintings leave a residue – familiar enough that I can almost believe that I have.
Sophie Victoria Horne 2025