McClelland, Neil

Originally from Quebec, Neil McClelland splits his time between his home and studio in Edmonton, Alberta and Victoria, BC. He teaches visual arts part-time at the University of Victoria, Thompson Rivers University, and Vancouver Island School of Art. McClelland received his MFA from the University of Victoria in 2014 and has had solo and group exhibitions in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. He is a 2016 and 2020 grantee of the internationally prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and his paintings are in collections including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Colart Collection.

Artist Statement

Through expressive mark making, narrative, and symbol, I seek in my work to bring a sense of wonder and mystery to explorations of place, belonging, human relationships to nature and the cosmos, and the interconnectedness of everything. I engage with the material qualities and possibilities of paint to convey a visceral, unmoored, and indeterminate sense of place and time and to suggest what is simultaneously familiar but strange. My process involves not so much recording actual places but rather distilling them in a search for meaning. The work brings together fragments of my memories and visual experiences to create collisions of the everyday with the sublime, uncanny, cosmic, or unusual. The paintings are of “no places” and in-between places and landscapes that are not so much about landscape as they are about the human condition. I understand my paintings as spaces filled with possibilities, defamiliarized but somewhere where we might find something of ourselves and our world.