Kimberlee Frederick

Kimberlee Frederick
Portland, Oregon, USA

STATEMENT

My collages fixate on the tension between bodies and the space they take up in the world, finding root in unsettling depictions of the human form. I make both digital and hand-cut collages, and my medium of choice depends on the mood that sparks a collaging session. My digital practice is fast-paced and typically driven by at least a vague end result in the back of my mind, while hand-cut work happens in a state of deliberation, deep mulling, and happenstance discovery during an unfolding narrative.

I lean into the grotesque because manipulating the mass and matter of fears–teeth, spiders, wounds, tiny holes placed too close together–gives me agency against them. Stoking the fires of discomfort and anxiety lets me dig into the relationship between attraction and repulsion in way that makes me feel like I’m leaving my own body parts on the canvas.

My aim is for my work to reach people that need to hear the same thing I do: that there’s catharsis on the other side of what makes your skin crawl. When I collage, I live inside my knee-jerk repulsion reactions to my images. Maybe I’m selfish, but I’d like you to live there with me.

BIO

Kimberlee Frederick is a self-taught collage artist residing in Portland, Oregon. A lifelong cut-and-paster and collector of ephemera, she began collaging in earnest in mid-2020 and has continued to develop both her digital and handcut collage approaches. Her work is informed by an obsession with the genre of horror and tends to fixate on a general discomfort with bodies and how vulnerable they are–to nature, to time, to all things material and ephemeral. Her work has been published in literary and arts journals such as Wrongdoing Magazine, Body Fluids, and Unstamatic. Her collages have also found homes in some of the greater Portland area’s smaller, communal galleries like Gallery X at the Art Design Xchange, EarthSpace PDX, and, later this year, One Lane Road.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.kimberleefrederick.com

IMAGES