Kimberly Morrison’s art career began with three trips: one to Burning Man, one to the art store to pick up watercolors, and one on mushrooms.
Burned out from her career as a journalist, something inside her yearned to “make a mess and play in color.” She didn’t grow up practicing art. Art came to her when she could no longer express herself through words.
“I have always sought to express myself, but I thought that I didn’t actually have a lot of creativity in me. I was trained as a journalist. You stick to the facts. Report the information. I reached a point where I realized that my talent in expressing myself verbally was actually becoming taxing on my brain. I felt this nagging need to express myself in a different way.”
A pivotal point in her life, she said, was attending Burning Man. Art had always seemed serious, intentional and in need of conveying an important message. But there, she learned it didn’t need to check a certain box.
At the time, Morrison didn’t know whether she could be an artist, let alone draw a picture. But inspiration persisted. She bought some watercolors, took some mushrooms and overcame the part of her brain plaguing her with perfectionism.
“We’re just going to make a mess,” Morrison told herself. “We’re going to scribble. We’re gonna be a child again.”
And that was the beginning of her art career.
She taught herself composition through abstract and fluid painting while simultaneously transitioning into a career in marketing. But the stress and creative limitations of corporate life stifled her once more.
“I was dying to find something that could provide a little bit more meaning. My clients were Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, and it started to feel like my creative talents were sucking the life out of me just to make big corporations a cent of more money. And I went, I can’t do this anymore.”
She headed to Bali in search of that meaning. The relocation stripped her of her physical paint supplies, and her creative flow went dormant. A few years later, the urge to create returned.
“I wanted to play,” she said, “and if all I can do is play digitally, that’s what I’m going to do.”
From there, Morrison developed the style that now defines her work: a blend of digital and analog collage, built around the philosophy of “remixing a dream of the future past.”
The phrase refers to a state of “dream logic,” in which someone is trying to make sense of something that doesn’t quite make sense. It also alludes to how the present moment was once part of someone else’s imagined future. The dream of the future past echoes throughout her work, remixing time itself.
Her work combines surrealism, retrofuturism and dreamcore, creating images that “feel like an echo of something familiar.” She layers together imagined and real elements, combining the whimsical, the emotional and the nonsensical.
Nostalgia runs through much of Morrison’s work. Unsolved Mysteries became the backdrop of her childhood, immersing her in a world of aliens, unexplained phenomena and imagined futures. Her collages borrow from the optimistic visions of the future imagined during the 1960s, the neon aesthetics of 1980s vaporwave and the futuristic promises of the Y2K movement.
“I think of my art as sort of like music mashups that bring together a lot of different styles, but they’re able to overlay in a way that pieces them together and makes it something new,” said Morrison.
For Morrison, those imagined futures offer an escape from the anxieties of the present.
“For me, my art is a lot of escapism. I think it originated as a way to bring myself some happiness. I create worlds that I want to escape to, worlds that are happy and bright and have my favorite things like pin-ups and aliens and bubbles.”
The same sense of escape appears in her use of color. Her brush frequents a candy-colored palette, dipping in bright saturated pinks and blues.
When she first started painting, she told herself, “I don’t know if I’m going to make art or if I’m going to make a mess, but what I do want to do is play in color.”
Her influences extend beyond retrofuturism. While influenced by Banksy-styled stencil art and the saturated alcohol inks of Lora Zombie, Morrison absorbs everything around her as inspiration. Vibrant East African fabrics, mountain landscapes in Colorado and street art from around the world find their way into her collages.
“I would love for the future to be as colorful as the work I create,” she said.
Today, Morrison moves fluidly between digital and physical media, even deconstructing her digital work to create new pieces on canvas and expanding into wearable art.
“I didn’t grow up with a lot of nurturing of my artistic skills,” said Morrison. “I think I took an art class in college, but I just didn’t think that I had it in me. It’s kind of funny to look at the work that I have now and say that, but there has certainly been the majority of my life where I didn’t think that I was a creative person.”
The woman who once doubted her own creativity has now produced over 100 prints. While she continues to work as a freelance marketer, becoming a full-time artist remains her dream.
After years of shifting through burnout in search of creative satisfaction, Morrison can now turn to her own work for comfort.
“Sometimes when I’m having a stressful day, I go flip through my own art.”
