Artist Biography
Eve-Marie Kimmerling is a Group Analyst in private practice based in Co. Mayo in the West of Ireland.
Deeply rooted in her rural West of Ireland context, she was ‘astounded into being’ as a collage artist in a creative response to the often turbulent, fragmented, and disembodied nature of our recent times.
While she has over 20 years’ experience working as a therapist, she is relatively new to her art making practice, having started in 2022.
As an artist, she sees her collage work as an extension of her group analytic practice. The groups she belongs to and their wider social context inform and influence the collages she creates.
Creating her colourful pieces became a way of reflecting on, processing, and expressing themes arising in her work as a group analyst.
This body of work represents a foray into new ways of attempting to represent and articulate the undrawn themes arising in these groups.
Statement of Practice
I create my collages with media found from my everyday life, preferring to let synchronistic chance bring images and text to me, rather than seeking out something specific.
I aim for a ‘bittersweet’ counterbalance between heavy and light subject matter. I take my time letting the right materials find me, playing with their arrangement and allowing unconscious themes to emerge through the work.
Once the core elements are assembled, I begin layering on tissue paper to match tones in the image, or tones that remind me of the rural context and landscape around me.
All images and tissue paper are torn to create rough, textural edges. After finding pieces of text that speak to me, I rewrite the phrases by hand, sometimes combining or rearranging words in a free associative process. After the layers are assembled the images and text are backed with card then these layers are glued to the tissue paper backing.
I see the individual collages as in conversation with one another, hanging them together to create a matrix of text, image and colour. Inspired by concertina books, the collages form a type of Jacob’s ladder which allow subconscious ideas to climb upward into realization and to resonate in dialogue with each other.
