ISABELLA KIRKLAND, Nova
Isabella Kirkland’s Nova series focuses on species of flora and fauna that are new to scientific literature within the last 20 years. The number of species that remain “undiscovered” is difficult to estimate. Many scientists believe that of all living things on earth, perhaps only 10 to 15 percent have been given a Latin name and assigned a place in the larger picture of evolution.
Each of the four canvases in this series depicts a different layer of a typical montgne rainforest: forest floor, understory, canopy, and emergent, or topmost, layer. While the plants and animals shown in the paintings are rainforest denizens, they are from many different parts of the world and would never be seen together in real life. The ecosystems pictured are thus idealized scenes, existing only in the imagination. In general, the accurate representation of recently discovered flora and fauna is difficult. Often the only people with clear images and knowledge of a new species are the describing scientists themselves; their descriptions, specimens, and drawings, as well as the work of wildlife artists and photographers, have served as references for the renderings of the species included here.
The paintings in Nova provide a glimpse of the miraculous variety of butterflies or orchids or birds that evolves in response to available resources and conditions, whether in the world’s remaining rainforests or in our own backyards. There is so much alive on the earth that remains to be discovered. But while these paintings’ narrative of abundance and discovery seems hopeful, the creatures in them are often surviving in ever shrinking remnant habitats. Nearly all are in jeopardy of being “lost” even as we “find” them.
Forest Floor (2007) shows a stream habitat. In general, the soil in an environment such as the one pictured here—the floor of a mature rainforest—is shallow and nutrient poor, its minerals washed away by an annual rainfall of between 75 and 225 inches. A host of nearly invisible decomposers, including springtails, nematodes, tardigrades, bacteria, and fungi, breaks down fallen leaves, branches, and other plant detritus; the usable nutrients produced by their activities are promptly taken up again by vegetation.
Understory (2007) depicts the middle level of a prototypic tropical rainforest. The species of flowering tree that provides the underlying structure for this painting has branches that grow in an unusual pattern of alternating Vs off the main trunk. This pattern is reminiscent of the diagrams known as cladograms—from the Greek word for “branch”—that are used to sort species into phylogenic or taxonomic order. The array and number of birds and animals depicted invokes the crowding of more and more of our biodiversity into smaller and smaller plots of uninhabited land.
Canopy (2008) shows the sunlit world of the treetops. Terry Erwin, a beetle specialist and chairman of the Entomology Department at the Smithsonian Institution, calls the rainforest canopy “the last biological frontier.” This habitat was uncharted territory until the 1970s, when researchers began using high-tech mountaineering equipment to climb up into it and canopy rafts—made from mesh stretched over inflatable pontoons—to perch on top of it. A mature canopy tree is crowded with a wide range of flora: mats of mosses, hornworts, and liverworts; lianas and ferns; a host of epiphytes such as orchids (some no bigger than a thumbnail); gardens planted and tended by ants; and even fruiting shrubs and natural bonsais that have taken root—the whole, along with a multitude of animals and birds, a veritable microcosmic Eden hundreds of feet in the air.
Emergent (2011) depicts the uppermost layer of a rainforest, where the tallest trees emerge into full sun. In this airy part of the forest habitat, 200 feet above the ground, plants and animals exist that are seen nowhere else, and whose entire life cycles are spent in the trees. The trees themselves, mostly evergreen hardwoods, live very self-contained lives—most do not touch their neighbors at all. Species tend to bloom synchronously, though they are usually spaced widely apart—rarely do you see stands of one kind of tree. Rainforests are so highly diversified that not only are the microscopic organisms of one tree distinct and different from those of other trees, but each leaf on an individual tree shows a remarkable diversity of mosses, liverworts, lichens, bacteria, and other minute organisms unique to that leaf alone.
Isabella Kirkland was born in 1954 in Old Lyme, Connecticut. She attended Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, before moving to San Francisco to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. This is her third one person exhibition at Feature Inc., and she has also had solo exhibitions at The Toledo Art Museum, Ohio, the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, and the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Idaho. Isabella Kirkland's paintings have been included in group exhibitions at the Tucson Museum of Art, de Pury & Luxembourg, Zurich, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She currently lives in Sausalito, California.