Kate Downie moved from Edinburgh to Fife in 2018 to build a new studio. Engineering has for a long time been rich pictorial territory for the artist and the collaboration between artist/architect/builder represented by the construction of the new studio as well as the major St James site in Edinburgh provided fertile subjects. Growing Forms applies as much to organic as material forms, but what unites this varied body of work is the artist’s eye, always drawn to movement and energy transference. The waving Summer Grasses echo the dance of the diggers in Moving Earth; an Atlantic wave explodes out into the sky above the shore like the leaves of The Summer Vine reaching for the light. This expansive growth is echoed in the new drawings of the builders’ enthusiastic construction, making a place both for contemplation and future creativity.

Click here to read more about the work in Kate’s exhibition.

Kate Downie

Photography by Alicia Bruce

Born: 1958

Place of Birth: North Carolina, USA

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

Please click here to view prints by the artist

Growing Forms

Kate Downie

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