Kimberly Interview:

I think what I’m aiming for is this notion of, I guess, seduction and revulsion. Something that’s really beautiful, really lush, rubbing up against something that’s also perhaps repulsive.



I’m an artist and Roadkill Resurrecter.





The first body of work that I really did in this sort of vein was called Domestic Arrangements and Domestic Arrangements has the aesthetic of a magazine spread of the perfect suburban home, so there’s these sort of really bright colors, lots of pattern, at the same time that it’s just not quite right.



This is my studio, which is space for taxidermy, for making photographs,



Soundup: Snakeskins?



Kimberly Interview:

and for my various collections of anything from the natural world that I find.



The project developed because I moved here to New Jersey and my husband and I bought this house, so I was spending a lot of my free time, looking through home design magazines, then going on this commute where I intersect with a lot of roadkill.



I think it was that combination that kind of came together to begin the projects that I’ve been working on now for close to seven years.



Kimberly Driving Soundup:

So this is where I find starlings all the time and actually some other little critters too. I found a groundhog here. Up, there’s something, what’s that?



That one’s clearly, clearly too far gone.





Kimberly Soundup:

Oh yea, he’s really beautiful. Looks like he had something in his mouth, like he caught a bug or something and he was probably paying attention to that and not the cars.



Kimberly Interview:

You have to sort of pick roadkill up as you see it, but when you see it isn’t necessarily always a convenient time to use it in a still life or come up with a creative idea for it, so for that reason, I have a freezer, where I keep my specimens until they’re ready for their close-up.



Kimberly Soundup:

Oops he’s a little bit frozen



Tomatoes.



That’s a baby bunny. He’s just sort of cute and sad at the same time.



Kimberly Interview:

When you pick up a squirrel, you have a chance to look at that thing really closely in a way that you can’t look at that animal as it scurries by.



Kimberly Interview:

The way it really works is, I’ll have a creature, whatever that may be, I’ll sort of start to think about the form of that creature and I start to think how can I pose it with these various objects.



And a lot of the initial process of shooting is just setting up some fabric backdrops, putting the animal in front of it and seeing how the light plays, how the color plays.



When you have something that’s beautiful, that’s also dead, it immediately introduces the tension.



There is a long history of this memento mori, remember death, in artwork. It really is meant to sort of show that there’s all this lushness and all this beauty, but it’s also, it’s fleeting, so you should sort of appreciate that beauty for as long as you can.



I feel like, in some way, I am taking these animals and removing them from a spot where they’ve unfortunately been killed, and I try to give them a respectful end. So I might immortalize them in a photograph or perhaps their skin in taxidermy, but then I I bury them in the woods and I’d like to think that that’s a better end for them