Born in 1954, Isabella Kirkland grew up Richmond, VA. She attended Guilford College, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the San Francisco Art Institute. She was also, for a time, the only licensed female taxidermist in New York City. Research for her current cycle of work called TAXA takes her to natural history museums around the world. “Taxa”is a Greek word meaning "order" or "arrangement": taxonomy is the science of describing species and fitting them into proper evolutionary order on the tree of life.
So far there are six paintings in this cycle depicting nearly 400 species. Almost every plant or animal is measured, photographed, drawn, and observed first hand, either live or from preserved materials. All are painted at life-size to ensure accuracy of scale. Each picture in this series has taken a year or more to complete, depending on the subject matter. The paintings explore how current biodiversity science can inform art-making and how art objects contribute to both political and scientific dialogues.
GONE (2004) shows sixty-three species of plants and animals that have gone extinct at the full species level. BACK (2003) contains forty-eight that have gone to the brink of extinction and been carefully husbanded back, or were presumed extinct and then re-found. The sixty-eight species included in Trade (2001) are all harvested in the wild and sold through both legal and illegal markets. Collection (2002) features plants and animals that people and institutions treat as decorative objects - to admire in private, to exhibit, or to study in depth – and that have peculiar stories surrounding their collection from the wild. ASCENDANT (2000) is of non-native species introduced in some part of the United States or its trust territories, all on the increase as they successfully out compete native residents. Those species endangered in the United States were covered in DESCENDANT (1999). The current cycle in development will cover recent discoveries, all new to westerners and the scientific literature since the enactment of the Endangered Species Act in 1973.  |
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Recent Exhibitions
Feature Inc, New York, NY, March - April 2005
Natural Histories: Realism Revisited
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Scottsdale, AZ
May 29,2004-September 5, 2004
Feature Inc,
New York, NY
May 2003-June 2003
Feature Inc.
New York, NY
June 1, 2002 – July 5, 2002
“TAXA”
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco, CA
November 17, 2001-January 29, 2002 |
Selected Publications
Grand Street
Grand Street Press
New York, NY
Vol. 71, Spring 2003, pgs. 92-96
(Article & color plates)
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Artforum International
(“Best of 2002”)
New York, NY
December, 2002, pgs. 116 & 117
(Review & image)
The Future of Life
By E. O. Wilson
Alfred A. Knopf,
New York, NY
2002
(Cover illustration and interior drawing, international hardcover and paperback versions)
about this book>
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gallery information>
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