Kate Downie’s forthcoming exhibition Growing Forms documents the artist’s recent move from Edinburgh to north Fife. In this new body of work Kate celebrates the growing forms that surround and inspire her in her new purpose built studio.
The New Studio
Kate Downie has recently built a new studio and even through the construction process she put it to good use. Engineering has for a long time been rich pictorial territory for the artist and the collaboration between artist/architect/builder represented by the new-build became an irresistible subject. The title Growing Forms therefore applies as much to material as to organic growth, although landscaping and planting a new garden has also, inevitably fed into her work.
Kate DownieWe flitted in the summer of 2018 and along with our village house came a huge overgrown lawn edged by mature trees. Within this ‘creative field’ there was space to grow both a garden and a studio. As a painter and printmaker, swathes of time in my current life are spent making art so the transformation of the idea of a new purpose built studio into a reality has felt magical in all its stages.
The St James Centre project
Kate DownieBack in the city where I still had my studio last winter I witnessed the early stages of the Edinburgh St James development. Like a city-state within a city, its raw beginning hewn out of the stone and earth felt elemental, a kind of eulogy to change, for better or worse.
Print-making
Summer Grasses Print Series
Kate DownieThis exhibition is a modest expression of transition caused by the life changing decision to leave Edinburgh and move to north Fife. Removing ourselves from that city of stone, wind and shadows into a verdant rural valley whose industry is expressed through birdsong and leaf, tractor and plough was a migration of only one hour north yet it feels a world away.
