Statement

Kevin Corbett Hill’s practice is driven by an ongoing process of deconstruction and reconstruction of images, materials, emotions, and systems of meaning. Working across installation, sculpture, painting, and drawing, Hill investigates the unstable relationship between what is revealed and what is concealed, often layering text, geometry, and raw gestural marks to create surfaces and environments that both expose and obscure.

Across media, Hill engages entropy, chaos, and the aesthetics of the absurd as generative forces. Paint may be thrown or dragged, objects assembled without hierarchy, and drawings may collapse into erasure or scribbled text. Through these intuitive and often forceful processes, Hill embraces anarchy as a means of uncovering the psychological. Each mark, material choice, or structural interruption becomes a trace of emotional and existential states (desire, isolation, obsession, depression) transformed into formal elements.

In installation and sculptural work, this approach expands into immersive spatial experiences. Fragments, discarded materials, graffiti-like text, and diaristic notes accumulate into dense topographies that dissolve boundaries between found and fabricated, beautiful and ruinous. Viewers enter environments where clarity and distortion coexist, echoing Hill’s interest in non-hierarchy and the collapsing of traditional divisions between mediums.

In painting and drawing, these concerns emerge through layered surfaces, blurred imagery, lyrical lines, crossed-out text, and deliberate visual misdirection. The works operate as nonlinear journals, at once intimate, overwhelming, and emotionally saturated, inviting the viewer into a shifting terrain where meaning is continuously built, obscured, and undone.

Across all facets of his practice, Kevin Corbett Hill constructs a landscape of emotional ruins and reconstructed fragments. His work asks viewers to confront not only what is visible, but also what lies beneath the surface: the unstable nature of perception, memory, and the self.

“The American poet Walt Whitman once said, “I speak in multitudes.” In my practice I echo this idea. A vast array of interests form my aesthetic persona; I employ varying modes of production, along with the use of materials and supports. These I weave and combine in a completely intuitive practice. My paintings and work in general reflect the narcissistic, deconstructive, schizophrenic, and existential state of my mind. Aesthetically, my work displays a system of values that have no value. I reject reason and logic to entrust my personal intuitiveness, irrationalities, and emotions in making work that reflects a direct approach to the act of painting and the making of studio

practice in general. Displaying a state of disorder where all elements, painted, collaged, or otherwise assembled all become a mark in this gestural movement where any kind of hierarchy is temporary. Like the great existential dramas of the Abstract Expressionists, my work is foremost a record of a psychological and physical event, however pathetic and cobbled together it may appear to the viewer.

I am driven constantly to make work, and this impulsiveness in me to create is sometimes overwhelming, and as is my mind, restless. My studio work shows this: an obsessive nature and un-monumental aesthetic reflect that everything is temporary and has and was always meant to appear to fall apart. These collective interests are what lead me to making meaningful work of an interdisciplinary nature. The studio is a habitat for me and my working there reflects a record of an experience, where nature itself becomes a series of catastrophes, fragmented and broken then re-assembled, ruptured.