Memory issues with Mojave on MPB mid 2015 | Mac

I’m not entirely sure if this is a Mojave issue or something else entirely. It started a few weeks back prior to updating from High Sierra. I’ve been working on a big project which has me editing a bunch of large images in Pixelmator and the app kept crashing over and over again. I decided to download iStats Menu to get a readout if what’s going on with my computer when I have issues like these. Turns out Pixelmator kept eating up ram and then giving up on life. About 70-80GB of ram each time on my 16GB machine. I’ve also been using iStats to run the fans on max constantly which seems to keep Pixelmator running a bit longer before each crash. Now that I’ve upgraded to Mojave Pixelmator is running a little better too.

This whole time I thought it was an issue with just Pixelmator but just now I finished ripping a new blu-ray to my “movies” hard drive (external) and went to change the icon for the MKV file to be a PNG of the cover art and I get this in iStats and Finder froze up. I tried relaunching Finder and it quit finder but wouldn’t relaunch. All my desktop folders and files disappeared with it. I tried to shut down properly but all that happened was the menu bar disappeared and the computer stayed awake. I ended up doing a hard restart and now the ram is still maxing out from iconservicesagent. The amount of ram it’s taking up keeps growing too, it’s currently at 68.72GB and counting.

Also this whole time the kernel_task has been consistently eating 8-9GB of ram. I don’t know if that’s normal or if there might be something seriously wrong with that.

Any advice would be helpful. I do have a Time Machine backup as well as a clone of my SSD from before installing Mojave, but it was made after I started having these problems.

Apologies for mobile formatting. I would post from my computer if it wanted to do much of anything right now.