Taxa is a boxed suite of six large state-of-the-art inkjet prints based on paintings created between 1999 and 2004. Isabella Kirkland’s work examines man’s relationship to the natural world through intricate oil paintings in the style of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Dutch Master still life. Her life-size depictions of plants and animals are precisely rendered and anatomically accurate, the result of extensive research at natural history museums.

Descendant: These plants and animals are all in decline in the mainland United States, Hawaii, or Central America. Most are on either state or federal endangered species lists, while a few are now presumed extinct.
Ascendant: This picture is of non-native species that have been introduced in some part of the United States or its trust territories. They are all on the increase, as they successfully out-compete native residents.
Trade: Wild populations of the species in this painting are depleted by collection for both legal and illegal markets.
Collection: This painting is an exploration of our desire to possess. Featured here are plants and animals that people want to study in-depth, to exhibit, or simply to admire at leisure. The plants and animals in this picture have gone to the brink of extinction and been carefully husbanded back, or were presumed extinct and then rediscovered.
Gone: The sixty-three species depicted in Gone have all become extinct since the mid-1800s and the colonization of the New World.

The suite of prints was produced in 2007–08, 35 x 26.5”, printed by Trillium Press on Moab Entrada natural white, edition of 50, catalog included.