Undertow

About the work

A horizon of red sits high in the composition, its edge broken and irregular, bleeding into the ochre ground above it. Below, a series of vertical dark marks fall through the picture plane; rhythmic, gestural, weighted; pulling the eye down through layers of torn and stained paper built up like sediment. The palette is restrained: rust, ash, bone, charcoal, allowing the drawn line to carry the energy of the work.

Annie McIntosh works by touch and intuition rather than fine visual detail, and this method is legible in the piece; the paper layers accumulate rather than resolve, and the dark marks retain the immediacy of the hand that made them. Undertow resists a single reading of landscape, offering instead a study in accumulation, pressure and downward movement; qualities as psychological as they are geological.