End Note: Lorna Macintyre

Lorna Macintyre’s work is founded on personal and metaphorical associations, realised through photography and sculptural installation. MAP asked the Glasgow-based artist to present an image and accompanying text from her studio practice. Her response, a research photograph of a statue of Nike and a selection of quotes from her sketchbook, is published here.

All art aspires to the condition of music [1]

The ancient Greek word for element (stoicheion) meant letter (of the alphabet); the basic unit from which a word is formed. [2]

Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street…Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks [3]

The symbolists dealt in ‘association’, that is, in a sort of allusion almost of allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word, they made it a form of metronomy. The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like the numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2 and 7. The imagist’s images have a variable significance like the signs a, b and x in algebra. The author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics. [4]

Love is most nearly itself when the here and now cease to matter [5]

Kale is fully winter hardly
Spring Cabbage
Radish
Spinach [6]

Black, thready thread [7]
After all there are only two kinds of us,
men and women, the he and the she of it [8]

No objects but in things [9]

Lorna Macintyre: Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, January-March 2010

[1] Walter Pater. ‘The School of Giorgione’, in October’s ‘Fortnightly Review’, 1877 and Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 2ndedition, 1877
[2] Wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element
[3] Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Selbstbetrachtungen’, Berlin, 1913
[4] Ezra Pound, Fortnightly Review, September 1914, quoted in ‘Imagist Poetry’, Penguine Classics, 2001
[5] TS Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’, Faber and Faber, London, 1958
[6] Note to self
[7] As above
[8] William Carlos Williams, ‘I wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet’, New Directions, New York, 1977
[9] William Carlos Williams, ‘Paterson’, W W Norton & Co, New York, 1995