Neil Kathol Visual Art

I’ve learned a lot about the local environment over the last 25 years from ranching neighbours and fellow board members of the Livingstone Landowners Group, an ENGO, by virtue of having a family cabin located in the so-called Eastern Slopes of Alberta. Various pressures to the way the land and water are used and my (our) actions in response have worked their way into becoming a concern of my practice.

My work is influenced by other concerns. I am concerned with entropic processes, the movement of things and their re-location, the meanings available by juxtaposing material (E.g. my tape practice not shown much here but Cuba Monument is an example). If as I sense the centre of visual art is visual (no big surprise) and also conceptual; these two are goals – my vision and my concept as guided by experience and intuition.

I think about the nature of our nature and my own. I let myself be an evolved homonid acting amongst animals and plants which are also trying to do what they do. I may well just go out and paint mimetically or go into my studio and object-make intuitively (almost recklessly) because that is the activity and approach I have an appetite for. The painting or object I make is -potentially – what I want to have. I admit the motivation of the mental engagement one experiences when having a good look at their own output.

Places and materials yield information that passes through my mind and nervous system and then out to my hands, operating as a kind of mirror. That mirror is like anyone’s – it’s functionality is affected by its own particular set of experiences. My mirror seems to have a varying sensibility about how to reflect mind-found/mind-rationalized things visual. Disparate work is the result. “Good!”, I suppose.