Keeping Memory Alive in Photos and Textiles | Arts to Hearts

August 27, 2025

Click for the full interview with one of the top 100 Emerging Artists, Kimberlea Bass: https://artstoheartsproject.com/keeping-memory-alive-in-photos-and-textiles-kimberlea-bass/

At Arts to Hearts Project, we love conversations that reveal the stories behind materials, processes, and the memories artists carry into their work. In this interview, we sit down with multidisciplinary artist Kimberlea Bass, whose practice draws on family history, memory, and the passing of time. Based in Fort Worth, Texas, Kimberlea works across photography, mixed media, and assemblage, often beginning with discarded photographs, heirlooms, and found objects that she reimagines into layered works of art.

In our conversation, Kimberlea opens up about what draws her to overlooked items like doilies, vintage photographs, and silver trays, and how these materials carry traces of lives and traditions that might otherwise fade away. She shares how stitching, layering, and weaving function both practically and symbolically in her work—binding fragments together while questioning how women’s roles, labor, and identity are passed down and reshaped across generations.

We also learn how her experiences as a daughter, granddaughter, mother, and teacher inform her practice, and how time spent at residencies in France expanded her approach to seeing and creating. Throughout the interview, Kimberlea invites us to think about nostalgia—whether it is an act of holding on, or a way of letting go and giving discarded objects new meaning.

This conversation offers a thoughtful look at how memory and history live in material form, and how one artist transforms what has been set aside into something that invites all of us to connect, remember, and reconsider what endures.