about
about me
I'm Kimberlee, a digital and analog collage artist living in Portland, Oregon. Although I'm a lifelong collector of ephemera and casual cut-and-paster, I only began collaging in earnest in mid-2020. My work is a bit dreamy, a little surreal, and quite interested in our bodies, our inner dialogues, and our exterior worlds.
I strive sometimes to evoke wistfulness, sometimes anguish, and often the tension between the two. I think I operate under the suspicion that the good stuff lives where it all overlaps.
A big part of my identity as an artist is my drive to create community with some of the extraordinary artists in Portland and the Pacific Northwest. Variable Creatives (where I'm an artist collective member), One Lane Road, Splendorporium, Earthspace PDX, Pacific Northwest Collage Collective, and Curated Colours PDX have been integral to that journey. Check them out.
I also spend a lot of time writing, mostly creative nonfiction. My day job is in health communications.
why unreal city?
I chose Unreal City as the name for my creative presence online on a whim. It's from a stanza in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
Which I think just has it all: existential dread, allusions to stomach-churning bodily states, unnecessary French phrases, bleak cityscapes. Seemed a fitting series of images to invoke.