Isabella Kirkland’s painting Gone is full of life. Plants and animals crowd the composition, each rendered with extraordinary care. Then the title becomes clear. Every species in the painting is extinct. What first appears abundant becomes a gathering of creatures we can no longer encounter alive.
I photographed Izzy in 2023 in her old studio on the waterfront in Sausalito. Around her were bones and shells, fragments of insects, and dried flowers. These objects offered something to examine closely, their structures preserved long enough to be understood. Her paintings grow out of that kind of attention.
Extinction can seem impossibly large and remote, a succession of numbers we struggle to comprehend. Izzy makes the loss specific. Each organism has a shape and a history, a place among other living things. She gives us time to become interested in what we might otherwise pass over.
Her research takes her into natural history collections, where she measures, photographs, and draws specimens. Scientific records help her reconstruct what she cannot observe alive. The compositions bring together species that may be separated by continents, but their anatomy is carefully observed. In the original Taxa paintings, the organisms are depicted at their actual size.
Made between 1999 and 2004, the six paintings of Taxa examine different ways human activity changes the fortunes of other species. Each took nearly a year to complete. Descendant gathers threatened and endangered organisms. Ascendant considers species spreading beyond their native ranges. The crowded beauty of Trade conceals another shared history: its subjects have been depleted by commerce.
Collection turns toward our desire to possess and study the natural world. That desire has helped build the museum collections on which Izzy’s own research depends. Her subjects resist an easy division between human care and human harm. The same curiosity that draws us toward another creature can lead us to collect it, protect it, or put a price on it.
With Nova, she turned to species newly described by science. The paintings suggest how much remains to be understood. Organisms that would never share a forest appear together, their presence grounded in the work of researchers who have given them scientific descriptions. Each discovery adds another particular life to a world we are still learning to recognize.
I find something deeply moving in the time she devotes to this work. Each small subject demands decisions about proportion and color, about how it belongs within the whole. A painting takes shape through months of looking and reconsidering. A creature that might have escaped notice becomes difficult to forget.
The final two paintings in Taxa are Back and Gone. Back includes species that recovered from near extinction or were found again after being presumed lost. Gone records those for which that possibility has ended. Painted a year apart, they belong beside one another. One holds the relief of finding life where we feared it had vanished. The other leaves us looking at what we can never find again.
