Bio

Kia Neill is a multidiscipline artist working in mixed media drawing, painting, photography and sculpture. Neill has lived and worked in a number of cities throughout the U.S. as a professional artist doing public and private commissions, exhibitions, lectures, juroring and teaching college and continuing education for 15 years.

Neill is native to Chicago Illinois, received her MFA from The University of California, San Diego, and relocated to Denver CO in 2014 from Houston Texas, where she was Full-time Faculty of 7 years at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Glassell School of Art.  After repeat visits as a Guest Artist in the Breckenridge Arts District(now BreckCreate), Neill moved to Colorado to explore her deep attraction to the mountain landscape. The mountains have heavily influenced her work, including a large digital collage recently purchased by Southwest Airlines for Hobby International Airport. Neill currently teaches at University of Denver School of Art and Art History, in BreckCreate, and teaches snowboarding during the winters.

Neill will be an Resident Artist at The Children’s Museum of Denver January - March 2017, engaging the public and creating an artwork for the museum’s permanent collection.

Artist Statement

Through my work I create abstract simulations and studies of nature as I explore a sense of fantasy, sanctuary, research and spirituality. My influences are form and pattern within nature itself, and more recently, the human body as well. I pay attention to similarities I see between unrelated structures, such as the growth patterns of ivy as it reaches and wraps around other plants, to the webbed network of the human body’s circulatory system. Currently, I am looking more at spiritual metaphysics and the therapeutic properties of nature, while reflecting on my own personal sense of spirituality and recreation within natural landscape.

As a multidiscipline artist, I work in drawing & painting, digital photography, sculpture and installation. Working between multiple mediums allows me to take different approaches with my ideas, and helps me to progress quicker and more creatively through material and conceptual challenges. My process tends to be very meditative. Imagery and form in my work are often realized through material experimentation and accumulation of repetitive process. As I push capacity of medium, I discover possibilities to suggest pattern and shape similar to what I observe in nature, which I utilize in conceptualizing a series of works. Whether I am, producing a digital collage or mixing up watercolor and graphite, I try to create an image that portrays something that is sensed but not necessarily seen. In creating these abstract or surreal compositions I aim to perhaps portray multiple points of time or reveal the energetic experience of a landscape. Ultimately, I strive for an intimacy and detail that will provoke the viewer’s imagination and to perhaps offer the viewer a moment of contemplation coinciding with my own.