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| About the Artist Karl McKoy |
Karl McKoy was born in 1961 and brought up in the industrial north of England UK
“As a child I use to draw on walls any wall, my mums kitchen wall, across our back door, school
walls…it got me into all kinds of trouble but was for me the equivalent to a comfort blanket and
I never stopped doing it…Today I mostly work on wooden panels and construction paper, but it’
s kind of the same thing and done for the same reason.”
Karl McKoy is a mixed media collage artist, starting primarily with discarded materials found
around the industrial units of New York's Long Island City, rusted metal, weathered wood or
billboards, everything is then woven together by an intricate process which involves staining,
stitching and burning.
“My aim is to unify these disparate elements, so that everything looks like it belongs in the
story I am trying to tell”
He has been called an ‘Auteur’ (a person who claims complete authorship of their work)
sometimes outsider sometimes mainstream as they choose…relying mostly on the
benevolence of a devoted following of personal private collectors.
Karl’s images are about the processes within nature, scrutinized as if under a microscope,
symbolism and ambiguity becomes familiar, once we realize they are the common shapes and
forms we see around us everyday, what makes them different this time is that they are up in
our face, the surface of skin or the structure of a flower magnified past the point of recognition.
If there is a narrative it is arrives much later in the development of these overworked pieces
and remains only as a suggestion, forcing the viewer to engage in their own creative
interpretation.
“As a child I use to draw on walls any wall, my mums kitchen wall, across our back door, school
walls…it got me into all kinds of trouble but was for me the equivalent to a comfort blanket and
I never stopped doing it…Today I mostly work on wooden panels and construction paper, but it’
s kind of the same thing and done for the same reason.”
Karl McKoy is a mixed media collage artist, starting primarily with discarded materials found
around the industrial units of New York's Long Island City, rusted metal, weathered wood or
billboards, everything is then woven together by an intricate process which involves staining,
stitching and burning.
“My aim is to unify these disparate elements, so that everything looks like it belongs in the
story I am trying to tell”
He has been called an ‘Auteur’ (a person who claims complete authorship of their work)
sometimes outsider sometimes mainstream as they choose…relying mostly on the
benevolence of a devoted following of personal private collectors.
Karl’s images are about the processes within nature, scrutinized as if under a microscope,
symbolism and ambiguity becomes familiar, once we realize they are the common shapes and
forms we see around us everyday, what makes them different this time is that they are up in
our face, the surface of skin or the structure of a flower magnified past the point of recognition.
If there is a narrative it is arrives much later in the development of these overworked pieces
and remains only as a suggestion, forcing the viewer to engage in their own creative
interpretation.