I'm looking for that catharsis on the other side of what makes our skin crawl. ~Kimberlee Frederick
Can you believe the artwork in this issue? So creepy! So beautiful! Intense and brimming with mystery. We are in love with the way featured artist Kimberlee Frederick's artwork paired with the texts in this issue of WTR. It's no surprise that Frederick, is inspired by horror, but you may be surprised to find out what else inspires her. Read on!
Patricia Caspers: What brought you to collage? What inspires you?
Kimberlee Frederick: I was a teenager, 16 or 17, when I started collaging as an alternative to the daily journal I had been keeping for most of my life up to that point. As I was going through adolescence, I was finding that there was a blank space that writing couldn't quite get at, and collage mined it beautifully. I snagged junk mail with unusual images, printed pictures of my friends from MySpace, collected free catalogs or unique business cards that people dropped off by the community message board in my local coffee shop. I did it without any knowledge of the practice as art in and of itself; I had no understanding of the rich tradition of collage artists that I've been lucky enough to explore since then.
For about a decade, I stopped collaging entirely. I dabbled in other crafts, always seeking an outlet for my bursts of creative motivation, but it wasn't until the pandemic lockdown that I rediscovered my love of assemblage. This time around, my work was largely digital. Minimal apartment space and even more limited funds meant I couldn't really generate a new collection of tools and ephemera. Free-use digital images and a free Canva subscription let me cobble together visuals that felt like a sigh of relief: the tension in my head made manifest on the computer screen. I'm thrilled that over the last year or so I've been able to add analog collaging into my practice again, and it feels incredible to cut and paste like I did when I started collaging the first time, 15 years ago.
At the risk of sounding saccharine, I absolutely have to say that a huge source of inspiration is my husband, Shawn, and that's for two reasons. The first reason is that he's an artist himself—an electronic music producer and desperately skilled sound designer—and let me tell ya: He was just born to create great stuff. His creative charisma is palpable the second you walk into a room, and it's hard not to give into that unseen tug, the one that makes you want to engage with the hecklers at the back of your head. The second reason is that he makes really dark, anxious, dissonant music, gives his tracks very evocative names, and asks me to collage accompanying art for them. His single "In My Dreams My Teeth Are Cracking" is what kicked off my digital collage journey, and his sound keeps inspiring me.
Horror as a genre is the other inspiration source that I need to mention, specifically body horror. The films of David Cronenberg have been really influential on me, as has a lot of horror lit (Stephen King, of course, Eric LaRocca, T. Kingfisher, Anne Heltzel, Rachel Harrison, Catriona Ward). There are a few artists that take my breath away when I see their work and give me that ambivalent feeling of needing to make something of my own and being terrified to do so because it can't compare to theirs: Alex Eckman-Lawn, Annegret Soltau, Matt Lombard, øjeRum, Nadia Sarwar, to name far too few. When I'm seeking images with which to start a collage, I often select based on what gives me a visceral sense of disgust or discomfort. Antique anatomical illustrations, for example, or sketches of medieval medical tools. And it's not an attempt to be edgy or memorable or anything like that. I just have this urge to process my discomfort with bodies and how vulnerable they are – to nature, to time, to death, to anything hiding just offscreen. I think I'm looking for that catharsis on the other side of what makes our skin crawl.
PC: Do you think of horror as a kind of exposure therapy? Or are working through (and admiring) the process of making something beautiful out of fear? Or both?
KF: This is such a great question about why I like horror and how it motivates me, I'm stoked you asked it.
When I read, watch, or look at other people's contributions to the horror genre, it's a lot about walking myself through the stages of fear and anxiety. There's this fantastic opportunity with horror to trek through anguish/fear/pain and see some resolution. Often, that resolution is horrifying in and of itself, but it's still complete. So when I watch a horror film or read horror, my body gets this chance to experience intense and then come down from that experience in a way that feels so satisfying when I compare it with my relationship to fear and anxiety in my day-to-day life. Horror media, then, becomes this framework for giving my body and brain the catharsis so rarely available.
I think that mindset is at play when I make collages that sit within the body horror genre. I think I said above that I feel good about including an image when it gives me a gross, shivery feeling that I can firmly locate in my body; that tells me it's speaking to some kind of fear or unease that's in me. It feels a little like aggravating a little sore on your tongue in that it's repulsive, but there's some kind of urgent satisfaction to it. And that's another thing that pulls me in about horror--it's so often about longing, desire, unmet needs, the lacunae in human experience. That's just such juicy fodder, so even when my work isn't explicitly icky, there's usually a hint of obsession with those ideas.
And, as you mentioned, juxtaposition is so exciting to me. Putting gorgeous florals or vibrant colors alongside images that evoke death, loss, decay, or fear feels very honest. And, sometimes, it's how I convince myself to sit with a piece that incorporates particularly visceral images. I need something beautiful to be like an anchor.
PC: Ooh, it's sort of the inverse of the tradition of the still life with flies hinting at death. I love that! Tell me about the process of adding analog images to your digital collage. That sounds fascinating!
KF: I'll clarify that, for the most part, digital collaging and analog collaging are two separate practices for me. There's one exception in the work I submitted to West Trestle, and that's the piece."I'll feel like this forever..." For that one, I created a collage with a standard analog approach of cutting and pasting. Once I finished it, I scanned it and ran it through a few different digital processes to produce the sort of dreamy, melted effect that the final draft has. That was a blast to do, and I've dabbled in that approach a little more recently.
But most typically, it's an either/or thing for me: digital or hand-cut. The medium of choice depends on the mood that sparks a collaging session. My digital practice is fast-moving and typically driven by at least a vague end result at the back of my mind. I'll sift through my collections of anatomical illustrations and Unsplash (my go-to for photography to use in collages), looking for a specific item, pose, mood, animal, whatever. Maybe it's fair to say it's more intentional an approach?
Collaging with physical materials happens at an entirely different pace. I flip through stacks of images many times over, pulling one out the fourth or fifth time I see it, apparently noticing some arcane quality. Rarely is there a final scene in mind when I set out to collage by hand. Instead, I feel like I'm listening to a conversation happening between the elements that I pick out, and my job is just to represent that conversation to the best of my ability.
Kimberlee Frederick: I was a teenager, 16 or 17, when I started collaging as an alternative to the daily journal I had been keeping for most of my life up to that point. As I was going through adolescence, I was finding that there was a blank space that writing couldn't quite get at, and collage mined it beautifully. I snagged junk mail with unusual images, printed pictures of my friends from MySpace, collected free catalogs or unique business cards that people dropped off by the community message board in my local coffee shop. I did it without any knowledge of the practice as art in and of itself; I had no understanding of the rich tradition of collage artists that I've been lucky enough to explore since then.
For about a decade, I stopped collaging entirely. I dabbled in other crafts, always seeking an outlet for my bursts of creative motivation, but it wasn't until the pandemic lockdown that I rediscovered my love of assemblage. This time around, my work was largely digital. Minimal apartment space and even more limited funds meant I couldn't really generate a new collection of tools and ephemera. Free-use digital images and a free Canva subscription let me cobble together visuals that felt like a sigh of relief: the tension in my head made manifest on the computer screen. I'm thrilled that over the last year or so I've been able to add analog collaging into my practice again, and it feels incredible to cut and paste like I did when I started collaging the first time, 15 years ago.
At the risk of sounding saccharine, I absolutely have to say that a huge source of inspiration is my husband, Shawn, and that's for two reasons. The first reason is that he's an artist himself—an electronic music producer and desperately skilled sound designer—and let me tell ya: He was just born to create great stuff. His creative charisma is palpable the second you walk into a room, and it's hard not to give into that unseen tug, the one that makes you want to engage with the hecklers at the back of your head. The second reason is that he makes really dark, anxious, dissonant music, gives his tracks very evocative names, and asks me to collage accompanying art for them. His single "In My Dreams My Teeth Are Cracking" is what kicked off my digital collage journey, and his sound keeps inspiring me.
Horror as a genre is the other inspiration source that I need to mention, specifically body horror. The films of David Cronenberg have been really influential on me, as has a lot of horror lit (Stephen King, of course, Eric LaRocca, T. Kingfisher, Anne Heltzel, Rachel Harrison, Catriona Ward). There are a few artists that take my breath away when I see their work and give me that ambivalent feeling of needing to make something of my own and being terrified to do so because it can't compare to theirs: Alex Eckman-Lawn, Annegret Soltau, Matt Lombard, øjeRum, Nadia Sarwar, to name far too few. When I'm seeking images with which to start a collage, I often select based on what gives me a visceral sense of disgust or discomfort. Antique anatomical illustrations, for example, or sketches of medieval medical tools. And it's not an attempt to be edgy or memorable or anything like that. I just have this urge to process my discomfort with bodies and how vulnerable they are – to nature, to time, to death, to anything hiding just offscreen. I think I'm looking for that catharsis on the other side of what makes our skin crawl.
PC: Do you think of horror as a kind of exposure therapy? Or are working through (and admiring) the process of making something beautiful out of fear? Or both?
KF: This is such a great question about why I like horror and how it motivates me, I'm stoked you asked it.
When I read, watch, or look at other people's contributions to the horror genre, it's a lot about walking myself through the stages of fear and anxiety. There's this fantastic opportunity with horror to trek through anguish/fear/pain and see some resolution. Often, that resolution is horrifying in and of itself, but it's still complete. So when I watch a horror film or read horror, my body gets this chance to experience intense and then come down from that experience in a way that feels so satisfying when I compare it with my relationship to fear and anxiety in my day-to-day life. Horror media, then, becomes this framework for giving my body and brain the catharsis so rarely available.
I think that mindset is at play when I make collages that sit within the body horror genre. I think I said above that I feel good about including an image when it gives me a gross, shivery feeling that I can firmly locate in my body; that tells me it's speaking to some kind of fear or unease that's in me. It feels a little like aggravating a little sore on your tongue in that it's repulsive, but there's some kind of urgent satisfaction to it. And that's another thing that pulls me in about horror--it's so often about longing, desire, unmet needs, the lacunae in human experience. That's just such juicy fodder, so even when my work isn't explicitly icky, there's usually a hint of obsession with those ideas.
And, as you mentioned, juxtaposition is so exciting to me. Putting gorgeous florals or vibrant colors alongside images that evoke death, loss, decay, or fear feels very honest. And, sometimes, it's how I convince myself to sit with a piece that incorporates particularly visceral images. I need something beautiful to be like an anchor.
PC: Ooh, it's sort of the inverse of the tradition of the still life with flies hinting at death. I love that! Tell me about the process of adding analog images to your digital collage. That sounds fascinating!
KF: I'll clarify that, for the most part, digital collaging and analog collaging are two separate practices for me. There's one exception in the work I submitted to West Trestle, and that's the piece."I'll feel like this forever..." For that one, I created a collage with a standard analog approach of cutting and pasting. Once I finished it, I scanned it and ran it through a few different digital processes to produce the sort of dreamy, melted effect that the final draft has. That was a blast to do, and I've dabbled in that approach a little more recently.
But most typically, it's an either/or thing for me: digital or hand-cut. The medium of choice depends on the mood that sparks a collaging session. My digital practice is fast-moving and typically driven by at least a vague end result at the back of my mind. I'll sift through my collections of anatomical illustrations and Unsplash (my go-to for photography to use in collages), looking for a specific item, pose, mood, animal, whatever. Maybe it's fair to say it's more intentional an approach?
Collaging with physical materials happens at an entirely different pace. I flip through stacks of images many times over, pulling one out the fourth or fifth time I see it, apparently noticing some arcane quality. Rarely is there a final scene in mind when I set out to collage by hand. Instead, I feel like I'm listening to a conversation happening between the elements that I pick out, and my job is just to represent that conversation to the best of my ability.
January / February 2023
Kimberlee Frederick is a digital and analog collage artist from the Pacific Northwest. Although she's lifelong collector of ephemera and casual cut-and-paster, she only began collaging in earnest in mid-2020. Her work is typically informed by an obsession with the genre of horror, and she tends to fixate on a general discomfort with bodies and how vulnerable they are—to nature, to time, to all things material and ephemeral. Frederick's aim is for her work to reach people that need to hear the same thing she does: that there’s catharsis on the other side of what makes your skin crawl.
Art: Kimberlee Frederick