Biography and Statement
Biography:
Kirsten Furlong is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice considers the ecological and poetic bonds humans have with animals and plants on lands that we collectively inhabit. Her investigations take the form of drawings and installations created from the viewpoint of a mixed race (Black/white) woman in the American West. Recent projects consider nuclear waste in the high desert of Idaho, declining habitat in the grasslands of the Great Plains, and the effects of climate change on species everywhere. In the work, animals and plants serve as both emblems of nature and as metaphors for human desires. This work has been shown at the Sun Valley Museum of Art, Missoula Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, High Desert Museum, Great Plains Art Museum, Southern Utah Museum of Art, MCLA Gallery 51, Andra Norris Gallery and the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center. Her work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Portland Art Museum, Corcoran College of Art and Design, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper at Rutgers University and Denali National Park & Preserve among others. Furlong has earned numerous fellowships and grants including the Alexa Rose Foundation Fellowship, the School of the Arts Grant from Boise State University and Affiliate Fellowship with the Center for Great Plains Study at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jentel Foundation, KHN Center for the Arts, the Montello Foundation, Signal Fire, Chalk Hill Artist Residency, Good Hart Artist Residency, PLAYA and Prairieside Outpost. Kirsten is the director of the Blue Galleries and a lecturer in the Department of Art, Design, and Visual Studies at Boise State University. She lives and works in Boise, ID with her husband painter William D. Lewis. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Boise State University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Artist Statement:
I create images and objects about human, animal, and plant interactions in places where these relationships are defining the Anthropocene. Recent projects relate to nuclear waste in the high desert of the western United States, declining bird habitat in the grasslands of the Great Plains, and the effects of climate change on species everywhere. In the work, animals and plants serve as emblems of nature and as metaphors for human desires. I use detail, repetition and patterns inspired by those encountered in the natural world as representational tools while also using mark making to express empathy, loss, and longing. The elegiac elements relate to the overwhelming impacts of human activities and interventions on the landscape and natural systems. What we have taken away or altered can rarely, if ever, be replaced or returned to its original state.
There is such an incredible complexity of ideas tied to the land and species that reside therein, which takes on a particular quality here in the Western U.S., where cultural beliefs related to the hierarchy of species, manifest destiny, and rugged individualism steer many political and social decisions and policies related to the land, humans and animals. I see my studio practice and vision as an artist as a counter narrative to these ideologies.
In drawings and installations, my process is to mimic forms and patterns made by plants and animals – tree rings, concentric lines on seashells, woven grass in a bird nest, fractal patterns on ferns and corals, spider webs, or the meandering line of a snake. This is a way of understanding processes via imitation and representation utilizing the intellectual, visual, and material tools of the artist.