The beauty of wildlife — and an artistic call to protect it | Isabella Kirkland

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"I think of my paintings as alarm clocks," says artist Isabella Kirkland. "They're reminders of what's at stake; the only problem is we keep pushing the snooze button." Investigating humanity's relationship to nature, she shares work that takes a creative stand against ecological despair — and quietly urges climate action through permanent images of vanishing wildlife.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ted Audio Collective.
0:02.0	Audio Collective.
0:04.0	I'm Elise Hugh, you're listening to Ted Talks Daily.
0:12.0	Helping all of us better see nature and how its creatures are doing is the focus of painter Isabella Kirkland's work, and she takes us through it in her 2023 talk
0:22.7	from the TED countdown summit.
0:24.2	To see her work for yourself,
0:25.4	you can check out the talk on TED.com.
0:28.2	And you can hear her after a short sponsor message.
0:37.1	This is a painting called Palisades. It shows what once used to live up along the Hudson River north of New York City.
0:41.8	I actually built it to help fund a new park in Guatemala.
0:46.0	If you and I were to take a walk through that site right now, we would see some of these plants and animals,
0:52.0	but a lot of them would be missing.
0:54.6	And to be honest, we wouldn't notice.
0:57.6	Gradual change is really hard to notice over time.
1:02.2	My artistic practice is an investigation into humanity's relationship
1:07.4	with nature, both what we have but also what we've lost. A painting like this one called Understory
1:15.0	begins with a rubric and a database, not with drawings.
1:19.0	The rubric is the rule of the painting.
1:21.0	For this one, it is, these of the painting. For this one it is these are new species and the database is built
1:26.2	out of a sampling of plants and animals that fit that rubric. It took me about four months of research,
1:33.0	probably two or three months of drawing,
1:36.0	and another six months of painting to complete understory.
	...

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