Location: Sausalito, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: isabellakirkland.com
Isabella Kirkland was born in 1954 in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and lives and works in Sausalito aboard an 1888 historic paddlewheel ferryboat moored in Richardson Bay, with a studio boat alongside it. She attended Guilford College in North Carolina and Virginia Commonwealth University before studying sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1970s. Her early career centered on impermanent conceptual installations using unusual materials and examining social issues; after a decade in New York, she moved to San Francisco where she worked with the Whole Earth Catalog. In 2004 she suffered neural and motor control damage from a parasitic roundworm infection; the resulting chronic neuropathic pain and dysesthesia led her to discover that painting could induce a flow state that abated the condition. She is a Research Associate in Aquatic Biology and Scientific Illustrator at the California Academy of Sciences, and an artist partner of Art to Acres, a global conservation organization. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Kirkland works in oil on panel, deploying the meticulous layered techniques of 17th-century Dutch still life painting to document species that are extinct, disappearing, illegally trafficked, or emerging from near-extinction. Her paintings are the result of extensive original research: she studies preserved specimens in natural history collections, pores over taxonomic records, and spends time in the field with the California Academy of Sciences. The effect is simultaneously one of abundance and elegy — hundreds of precisely rendered organisms crowded together in compositions that evoke the golden age of natural history illustration while subtly invoking the contemporary reality of ecological collapse. New York Times critic Ken Johnson described her work as producing “richly atmospheric pictures collectively populated by hundreds of animals.” She has been a featured speaker at TED, TEDx DeExtinction, and the Long Now Foundation, and has discussed her work with biologist E.O. Wilson.
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