Dead or Alive (Conversations with Joan) 2023-24
The painting Dead or Alive will be seen for the first time in public at the 198th RSA Annual Exhibition, after which it will form the centrepiece of Downie’ s forthcoming Exhibition/Publication Conversations with Joan at Glasgow Women’s Library in September 2024.
This large banner painting is the culmination of a research body of work initiated in 2021 during lockdown with the permissions of the Eardley foundation and Glasgow Museums.
In an attempt to complete the unfinished painting Two Children left on the easel in her Townhead Studio in Glasgow following her untimely death from breast cancer aged 42, Kate Downie RSA engaged ‘in conversation’ with Joan Eardley RSA.
Collaborating with a dead artist is not easy, but Two Children in its unfinished state was a blueprint of intention and a masterplan of painterly innovation in 1962.
Dead or Alive is a contemporary follow-on from this initial investigation into how Eardley formed relationships with the children who featured in her extraordinary body of Glasgow paintings, including an investigation into how she incorporated children’s graffiti/chalk markings in her paintings. The use and build-up of the red painted surface echoes the red metal doors below Eardley’s Studio which became a backdrop to many sibling dramas of the Samson family in the life of these paintings.
Co-created by the artist Kate Downie with 10 local village children aged between one and twelve, from October 2023 to January 2024, it pays homage to the continuing relevance of Eardley’s art but also seeks to address the children’s right to a happy future at a time of intense societal change and environmental precarity.