Allie Eagle today

Allie’s relationship with the academic and community arts communities in Auckland and through various other communities and institutions around the country has given her a strong link with contemporary art concerns. An abiding interest in maintaining and acknowledging a relationship with tangata whenua has provided her with powerful imagery that has informed a great deal of her recent work. These concerns, and her personal postion are often encoded symbolically into Allie’s painting, drawing and installations through visual metaphor and allegory.

In some respects Allie’s current preoccupations reflect some of her feminist approaches; her beliefs and experiences as a person are processed and expressed through her art practice. And in her long experience as an art teacher in secondary schools, tertiary institutions and in her atelier workshop, Allie’s interest in collaborative ways of working, something so important in the Women’s Art Movement and in second-wave feminism, is preserved and expressed. Her explorations with Atelier could be seen beginning during the collective years of the Womens Art Movement. However her atelier approach has moved along considerably with her experiences both of pakeha tertiary art institutions, where the individual artist works independently, to the Maori and Polynesian experience where there is a master or mistress artist who teaches and instructs by way of example. This is a mutually supportive system and can be seen in the painting ateliers of the deep past, including that of Rembrandt and his students.

In her current life Allie works full time as an artist, running her atelier (see photo) in Te Henga, a rural area just outside of Auckland. She periodically travels teaching, lecturing, making art and running workshops. She spent most of 2006 and some of 2007 working with her atelier on a large 7×2 metre commissioned Heritage painting for the Waitakere City Council. Currently she is on sabbatical helping to take care of her mother near Wellington.

To see or buy Allie’s recent work contact the Signal Gallery, Auckland (email)