ABSTRACT
Isabella Kirkland paints lush natural history works reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes or British natural history illustrations during the age of colonial conquests. Despite stylistic similarities to early natural history works, Kirkland’s paintings are importantly different from their predecessors. To help us make sense of the interconnectedness to non-human life, animal studies has turned from its early focus in the 2000s on singular species to a multispecies approach. So, while artists like Kirkland and Pestel focus their work on specific species extinction, they connect such loss to larger ecologies, including the human as a tectonic weight. There is a clear facticity to the images that give witness to life in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding areas—a wide shot of the Sheenjek River, white on white snow with an opening to a bear’s den, long trailing herds of caribou, close-up images of nesting loons.
