Anna May Kirk

Anna May Kirk, studio portrait. Photo: Joe Brennan

Anna May Kirk (b. 1996 Sydney, Australia) is an artist and curator exploring how environments transform across human and geological time, and how this change is perceived in the present. Grounded in sustained field research and collaborations with scientists, Kirk investigates how climatic events, extraction histories and technologies of measurement shape understandings of an increasingly unstable planet.

Kirk creates living sculptures co-produced with environmental forces, beings and landscapes. Material transformation lies at the centre of her practice, engaging materials from sites of scientific enquiry, such as plants grown from seed banks, locations of climatic change like volcanic sand from Mt Tambora, or materials altered by extreme forces and the body including glass and bronze. In doing so, environmental change co-forms the work to make tangible planetary shifts unfolding beyond the limits of human perception, from the microscopic to the planetary, deep time to urgent present.

Kirk works on Gadigal and Dharug land in Sydney. Forthcoming and recent projects include a new public commission for the Canberra Art Biennial developed in collaboration with the Australian National Botanic Gardens and National Seed Bank, alongside research undertaken through a residency in Longyearbyen, Svalbard in the high arctic. Kirk has exhibited throughout Australia, including at Powerhouse Museum, PICA Perth, QUT Art Museum, Firstdraft, Verge Gallery, Mosman Art Gallery, Cement Fondu and Ames Yavuz. She was awarded the Christine and Stephen Procter Fellowship and the Clitheroe Emerging Sculptor Mentorship in 2024. Kirk is currently an Exhibition Curator at Powerhouse Museum.

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“Contemporary environmental change fractures assumed truths about our relationship to the world and to ourselves. Whale Fall (II) employs glass and Pacific Ocean water in a sculpture composed of hundreds of blown lenses, fragmentating our perception into overlapping, unstable, and multiplied viewpoints.”
Anna May Kirk
Whale Fall, 2024
Borosilicate glass, Pacific Ocean water, steel
dimensions variable

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Exhibitions
- Exhibitions
  The World As Glass
  Group Presentation 16 Jan - 19 Feb 2026
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