Naomi McIntosh

Naomi McIntosh explores jewellery qualities in design and craft, on and off the body. In her current practice she works at different scales, from jewellery through sculptural objects, to immersive installations. She is interested in the interpretation of space, pattern and movement, through the relationship between the body and object.

Naomi McIntosh, Future Heritage 2017 Alumna

Using her architectural background, Naomi McIntosh creates spaces by using techniques similar to an architectural model maker. She incorporates a broad range of skills in her practice that includes digital and hand processes. Her work represents the experimental possibilities of materials, especially her preferred medium, wood. She uses different woods in her work, to create specific environments and feelings about space. Each wood can tell a narrative through grain, colour and form and is effective in telling a story about a place.

Naomi McIntosh has exhibited extensively with Craft Scotland and in 2018 was shown at ‘Crafted Visions’ - Jewellery Collection for Patina Gallery USA. In 2017 she exhibited in ‘Paper Jewellery’ – Jewellery Collection for CODA Museum Netherlands. Her work is in several collections including a series of lights informed by Duff House, Aberdeenshire for Historic Environment Scotland, and in 2017 her work was purchased by the Fitzwilliam Museum Collection Cambridge. McIntosh was also awarded the Inches Carr Award for Craft 2020, and has showed her work at Collect 2020.

Hirta Structure By Naomi McIntosh

At Future Heritage

For Future Heritage she made a special installation ‘In the woods,’ a series of CNC and hand cut wooden shelves and screens. Using beautiful spalted sycamore wood, sourced sustainably from near her studio in the Cairngorm National Park, in the Highlands of Scotland, she created intricate structures and volumes made from hundreds of different interlocking component parts that formed screens.

The screens were made using a combination of digital and handmade processes, similar to those she uses in her jewellery. She also explored qualities and concepts that she uses in the design of her jewellery to make ‘jewellery at an interior scale.’ The screens explored repetition, lines patternmaking, space light and transformed surfaces into three dimensional forms whilst celebrating the beauty of natural materials. They played with the perception of space as density and transparency is changes with movement.

“The opportunity to create new work for Future Heritage at Decorex enabled me to push the scale of my work. I enjoyed showing the work to a new audience, alongside exceptional makers.” - Naomi McIntosh

Current work

In her latest work Naomi McIntosh has investigated how objects can respond to place, though musical composition. She worked with two musicians, to consider how three dimensional pattern can be generated in ‘Music Making Landscapes’. The work sculpturally investigates landscape through a musician’s perspective and explores three dimensional spaces informed by sound. Sculptural wall pieces and jewellery made from interlocking individual wooden elements, forms are suggested within these pieces, volumes are captured and 2D wooden surfaces are transformed into sculptural 3D objects. With precise geometry the pieces explore the relationship between the body and objects and how volumes, patterns, planes and forms are seen.

Music Making Landscapes By Naomi McIntosh

If you would like to make an enquiry about Naomi McIntosh and commissions, get in touch here or visit her website www.naomimcintosh.com