Anna May Kirk is a multidisciplinary artist based on Gadigal land in Sydney. Kirk makes tangible the spectral nature of Anthropogenic climate change through sculptural glass, sensory installations, and film. From shifts in planetary weather patterns to microscopic chemical changes, her immersive works grapple with the many processes of environmental transformation that act upon temporal and geographic scales beyond the human sensorium. Kirk takes a research-based approach referencing past and contemporary moments of climate change, historical weather instrumentation, and aesthetics of the Romantic Sublime. Often utilising scent in her work, Kirk prioritises the non-ocular senses to involve the audience’s body as a sensitive instrument for encountering atmospheres of change. Her artworks act as conduits through which the intangible can become visible, employing materials that are porous to their changing environments, such as the crystalising 19th-century chemical composition of a storm glass, oxidizing copper, and glass. Kirk’s practice endeavors to facilitate corporeal encounters with the immaterial nature of climate change, producing new manifestations of our molten planetary condition.
