Allie Eagle (1949-2022)

Allie Eagle will be remembered for her contribution to the women’s art movement; her generative qualities as an art teacher; her courageous depth of commitment as an artist to the personal and political; and her capacity to enfold conceptual depth and detail within the traditional practicalities of painting—as a watercolourist in particular.

Educated at Ilam School of Art, then Auckland Teachers’ Training College in 1969, Eagle (then Alison Mitchell) returned to Christchurch in 1973 and established a practice that championed experiential content and strategies for change espoused by secondwave cultural feminism. Identifying as a lesbian separatist and radical feminist, through collective contexts and within her own creative activity, these years in Christchurch marked a critical juncture in the development of a politics of art (1975) she engaged with a range of feminist critical thinking that was being contemporaneously circulated across international contexts and communities. (1977) was a culmination of these concerns in local collective engagement and activism, with an aim of 'realising our creativity ... in ourselves as women’. A following show, (1978), included an all-encompassing exemplar of Eagle’s positioning: 40 poetically rendered watercolour paintings and central three-dimensional works, powerfully situated issues of abortion and rape, lived experience and identity, Goddess spirituality, and in her own vernacular, the abstract central core imagery of Judy Chicago. In the exhibitions that established her voice as an artist, she began to sign her works as Allie Eagle.