Kathy Coulson

Artist Statement

Layered, stitched, woven, fastened, fused—Kathy Manthei Coulson’s art captures her fascination with diverse materials and textures created through experimentation. Acrylic paint is often layered over sail cloth, metal, reactive paints, rust activator and oxidizing solutions on large sheets of mulberry paper, layered onto canvas. Recent work has become more sculptural, further exploring a wide range of materials and pushing their boundaries. Encaustic is fused over reflective surfaces, gold leaf and copper backgrounds, and used to create abstracted, wrapped, stitched sculptural forms.

Originally from California, Kathy has been living abroad since 1996, making Thailand her creative space since 1998.

She exhibits her work internationally, attracting private and corporate collectors. Kathy’s Elements series was shown at Sparrow Gallery in Sacramento, California in 2018. Over the years, her work has been accepted into several juried exhibitions across the United States including Landscapes or Seascapes, Shine, (re)Building, HxWxD, Call of the Wild, Journeys, the Jewelry Show, the Art Bra Show, Mapping as Source, Spectacular Skies, HEAT, the Ellene Ashcraft Membership Medley, Feeling Blue, WAX DIGITAL, Sum of the Parts, Shine, and Consequential Fusion: Messages in Wax. Several solo exhibitions have been held since 2001 in Thailand, USA and Cambodia. Kathy has been a member of International Encaustic Artists (IEA) since 2011.

Kathy’s path as an artist has led her to become involved in various creative projects within her local community, helping others explore their creativity. A graduate of the University of California at Davis, Kathy taught art to homeless and low-income women at the Wisdom Project in the United States. Through a grant from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission in 1996, she organized a series of self-portrait mask making workshops for children in California. She has also taught street children in Cambodia as part of a self-portrait workshop in collaboration with an exhibition of her paintings there in 2001.

Since 2002, Kathy has served as a Board Member of the Life Home Project, a shelter for HIV positive women and their children in Phuket, Thailand. While actively involved in the Arts Program there, she set up Project Neptune, an expressive arts therapy program for survivors of the Tsunami throughout Thailand’s affected provinces in 2005.

An Art Teacher for 17 years, Kathy taught Art while coordinating the CAS (Creative, Action and Service) program at the British International School, Phuket from 2008-2016. She will once again be returning to share her passion for Art teaching there in August of 2022.

Kathy is still currently pursuing her art full time, experimenting with various translucent and reactive media in celebration of the diverse and ever changing horizons and natural beauty of the world she is lucky to experience and appreciate daily.