Kirsten Furlong – Artist

“My current artistic practice engages with a series of questions about our culture’s multifaceted relationship to nature and the geography of human/animal interactions in urban and wilderness settings. These inquiries are utilized to contemplate various issues about the natural world and the concept of representation of animals and the environment. I create artworks based on first-hand observations and internal responses to objects, illustrations, and texts about various species. In the work, animals serve as emblems of nature and as metaphors for human desires.”

Kirsten Furlong was born in Milwaukee, WI and currently lives and works in Boise, ID (US). She received a BFA from the University of Nebraska (Omaha, NE) and a MFA from Boise State University (Boise, ID). She is the gallery director of the Visual Arts Center at Boise State University where she is also a lecturer in the Art Department.

Her work explores ideas related to humans’ multifaceted relationship to the natural world and includes drawing, painting, printmaking, and installations using paper and wood. She utilizes detail, repetition and patterns inspired by those she encounters in the natural world and found in the objects, images, and texts created to describe various environments, animals, and plants.

Header image: You Don’t Know Me (Wolf), acrylic, ink drawing, and chine colle’ on paper, 10″x 8″, 2016

 

Where did all the blue skies go?, ink, acrylic, colored pencil, and cyanotype collage on Tyvek, 48″x 45″, 2016 Title comes from the 1971 Marvin Gaye anthem Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology) about the loss of clean air and water
Promise and Purpose, the Ancestors’ Dream, Collage, ink, graphite, and colored pencil on paper, 60″ x 60″, 2015, collection of the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

 

We Can’t Love You Enough (Ivory-Billed Woodpecker), ink on paper, 30″x 22″, 2016 From a series of drawings about the longing to restore extinct bird species lost to habitat destruction and loss.

 

Repeat and Shift: Badger, charcoal, ink, graphite, and collage on paper, 60″x 60″, 2015
View from the Anthropocene: Grassland (Prairie Chicken), ink and collage on paper, 11″ x 9″, 2016 From a series of drawings about birds and mammals of the US living in habitats that are under threat.