About Eve-Marie
Eve-Marie Kimmerling is a Group Analyst and collage artist with a practice 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.
With over 20 years’ experience working as a therapist, Eve-Marie is relatively new to her art-making practice, having begun making collages in 2022. Her artistic practice has grown alongside her work as a group analyst, creating a space in which the two can meet.
She sees collage as an extension of her group analytic practice: another way of listening to and staying with experiences that may not yet have found words. The groups she belongs to, works with and encounters, together with their wider social and cultural contexts, inform and influence the collages she creates.
Creating these colourful pieces has become a way of reflecting on, processing and expressing themes arising in her work as a group analyst. Through collage, fragments of image, text, sensation and memory can be brought into relationship, allowing something of the ‘undrawn’ to begin to acquire form.
This work explores the intersection of group analysis and collage reverie, and the ways in which personal, group and wider cultural experience become woven together.
Where group analysis meets collage reverie.
Statement of Artistic 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.
