Kim Fifield is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Tauranga Moana, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her practice is grounded in eco-philosophy and new materialism, exploring relationships between people, materials and the more-than-human world, and the social and environmental systems that shape those relationships.

Working across décollage, biomaterials and living systems, Kim approaches materials not simply as a means of making an artwork, but as active participants in the work itself. Her ongoing material research has included the development of algae-based bioplastics, cultivated root systems, plant-based hides and other biodegradable matter, alongside the repurposing of discarded books and printed material through décollage.

Her work frequently considers ideas of consumption, labour, value, ecological responsibility and human relationships with the natural world. Through processes of growing, transforming, layering, eroding and repurposing materials, she explores the tensions between systems of production and the living environments upon which they depend.

Décollage forms another significant strand of Kim’s practice. Using pages removed from discarded and obsolete publications, she builds layered surfaces before tearing and excavating them to reveal fragments of imagery and language beneath. The process allows existing cultural material to be dismantled and recontextualised, creating new conversations around the histories, values and ideologies embedded within printed matter.

Kim completed a Master of Fine Arts with First Class Honours at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design in 2024, following a Bachelor of Creative Industries, majoring in Visual Art, from Toi Ohomai.

Her work has received recognition through a number of national contemporary art awards. She is a 2026 finalist in the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award for Contemporary Art and was previously selected as a finalist in the 2023 National Contemporary Art Award and the 2022 Miles Art Awards. Her work has been presented through solo and group exhibitions in Tauranga, Auckland, Hamilton and internationally.

Alongside her contemporary art practice, Kim has an established background in illustration and traditional animation. Early in her career, she worked as a background assistant artist with Toonz Animation on the Walt Disney Television Animation short film Redux Riding Hood (1997), which was subsequently nominated for the 1998 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. She has since illustrated nine published books and continues to work as a children’s book illustrator.

Kim’s current practice is increasingly focused on biomatter and the possibilities that emerge when organic materials are treated not simply as media, but as collaborators in the making process. Through growing, cultivating and transforming matter, she is interested in forms that are shaped as much by biological processes, time and environmental conditions as by the hand of the artist. This developing body of work extends her ongoing investigation into material agency, ecological interdependence and what it might mean to make art with, rather than simply from, the living world.