UA News

UA master's of fine art student Margaret Kimball, who produces intricate images of seemingly random thoughts and ideas, is showcasing her work at a UA gallery.

Six days had passed and Margaret Kimball had already spent 40 hours patiently filling a University of Arizona gallery wall with red, black and blue images and sprawling text.

At first glance, it appeared that Kimball, who sat in a dimly lit gallery space, was mapping dispersed and seemingly unrelated thoughts.

But, really, each tidbit of information – every spur of the moment sketch or seemingly random idiom – was connected to a single idea: identity formation.

A UA master's of fine arts student in visual communications, Kimball's mind map is currently on display at the University's Lionel Rombach Gallery, which presents new shows by UA students about every two weeks.

Her exhibition, "Unthinking: An Experiment by Margaret Kimball," will remain up through Feb. 26. A reception will be held Thursday from 3-5 p.m. at the gallery, located at the UA Art Building, 1031 N. Olive Road.

"Margi's work is poetic illustration," Brooke Grucella, the gallery curator, said about Kimball's work.

"I think her work is a perfect example of illustration, being that it is a pictorial representation of textual-based work," Grucella said.

"The free-form stream of consciousness is something all of us do, but how do we describe that or display that pattern," she also noted. "In addition to the difficulty of display, the artist is exposed."

By that, she means Kimball's thoughts are "out there for everyone to read, criticize, judge or relate to."

In some instances Kimball details the day and time of her progress. One thought reads, "Ultimately, I don't care at all what anyone thinks ...." Then she goes on to write: "While at the same time wanting desperately to be accepted by all."

Another stream of thought that sprawls out from a silhouette Kimball drew of herself reads: "Are my ears lopsided? Oh my god they are."

Kimball set out on the project, and similar others, after having an aha moment in one of her classes. She found the question of identity everywhere and, soon, began asking questions of her own.

"Everybody is always asking how you identify yourself, how old you are, where you live, where you are from, if you are dating someone," Kimball said. "You are constantly asked to identify your position in the world and I was thinking how that is such an impossible task."

Kimball, who studied illustration at the University of Connecticut during her undergraduate years, said she was quite interested in autobiographical narratives at the time.

But it wasn't until a class project last year that she began to evaluate the idea of identity and language.

"We were asked to come up with something that displayed our identity," she said. "I walked away from that wondering, 'What does that mean? How would you do that?'"

Kimball began doodling in her notebook and eventually devised an idea. Her "maps," as she called them, begin with an initial thought, then she begins to draw a picture of various and sometimes divergent experiences or associations.

"I started thinking about how linear language is," Kimball said.

"Language is this easy system we use but, in reality, every word we speak has this very deep history," said Kimball, who has also produced book jackets and covers, posters, brochures, Web designs, logos and other promotional items as a freelance graphic design.

"It sort of seemed natural that I'm making these maps," she said. "I thought, 'What would it look like to cover an entire space with my thoughts or any thoughts?'"