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Kate Downie believes in the transformational character of art. She applies her boundless energy to the project of making art in the certain belief that it matters. This optimism is part of her character sure, but goes beyond the personal: the work is made in an open, effusive, generous spirit; it is hers but it is not for her, it is for all of us. She has always sought collaborations, acknowledged her kindred spirits in art, travelled to learn new techniques in new materials, shared ideas (when some would keep them close to the chest like a poker hand) and enriched her practice.
So an exhibition of new work, significantly here at The Scottish Gallery for the Edinburgh Festival when we look outward with pride, is always going to be in narrative form, an internal and real journey, always hers but shared, its destination not wholly known at the outset. Anatomy of Haste is an important contribution to visual art for the Festival, 2017, the artist’s invitation to pause, the antithesis of her apparent subject.
Born in North Carolina, Kate Downie studied at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen before travel and residencies took her to the United States, England, Amsterdam and Paris. Over the past two decades Downie has established herself as one of Scotland’s most prominent artists. Her skill not restricted to painting alone, she works across a diverse range of artistic medium. One recent project for Pittenweem Arts Festival saw Kate juxtapose large colour-field prints with architectural charcoal drawings with extraordinary results. The majority of her work is defined by geography, and the artist’s response to the landscape or subject in front of her. Kate’s constant search for new challenges and inspirations has seen her set up studios in such diverse places as a brewery, an oil rig, and for her most recent show an abandoned Hydroponicum. Her work is held in many public collections including Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art; Kelvingrove, Art Gallery: Reitveld Kunst Academie, Amsterdam; the BBC and Edinburgh Council. Downie has enjoyed ten solo exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery. She is currently exhibiting at the Glasgow Women’s Library with Conversations with Joan. An exhibition based around Downie’s creative journey to complete a version of Joan Eardley’s painting Two Children left unfinished on her Townhead Studio easel at the time of her death in 1963.
‘One of my creative concerns is to define these spaces between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. The object lesson for me is the witnessing and the drawing of these nonplaces which are also, by definition, public arenas of cumulative activity. My job as an artist is to accommodate these actions in our contemporary lives, and to find the poetry within.’
– Kate Downie
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