ARTIST X ARTIST | Anna May Kirk X Gabriella Hirst⁠
Saturday 16 November, 4pm⁠ ⁠

We’re thrilled to present another BETTER NATURE Art + Events Artist X Artist talk for 2024 between Project Space artist Anna May Kirk and Berlin-based artist and writer Gabriella Hirst.⁠
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Together, the artists will speak about Kirk’s new commission for the BETTER NATURE Project Space as well and their respective practices, collaborations and recent research into whales.

Anna May Kirk is an multi-disciplinary artist, curator and creative producer based on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. Kirk makes tangible the spectral nature of Anthropogenic climate change through sculpture, 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 embeds the materiality of climate change within her works, creating ‘living sculptures’ with materials that are porous to their changing landscapes. In 2024, Kirk was awarded the Christine and Stephen Procter Fellowship and Clitheroe Emerging Sculptor Mentorship. In the same year she exhibited work with Cement Fondu, North Sydney Art Prize, Ames Yavuz, QUT Art Museum for the International Symposium for Electronic Art, and co-curated Garden at the End of Time at Tin Sheds Gallery. Kirk has held solo exhibitions at Firstdraft, Verge Gallery and Mosman Art Gallery, and exhibited work with galleries and museums across Australia including Powerhouse Museum, PICA Perth and Casula Powerhouse. She was awarded Highly Commended in the Valerie Taylor Art Prize and has undertaken residencies with City of Sydney, Blindside, and Parramatta Artist Studios, as well as an upcoming residency with the Satellite Institute in Norway, where she will develop a major new body of work. Kirk is currently a Program Curator at Powerhouse Museum and has curated projects taking the form of exhibitions, festivals and digital projects. In 2021, Kirk founded Supper Sessions, a grassroots arts funding initiative raising independent grants for artists through community dinners. Kirk holds First Class Honours from Sydney College for the Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from UNSW Art & Design.

Gabriella Hirst is an artist and writer from Sydney (Cammeraygal land), based in Berlin. She works primarily with moving image, sculpture, performance, and with the garden as a site of critique and care, exploring the politics of capture, the maintenance of illusions of stasis within archival systems, and the structural violence(s) embedded within decorative and ornamental forms. Gabriella’s recent projects have been exhibited and commissioned by UQ Art Museum, The Sainsbury Sculpture Center (UK), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (DE), Focal Point Gallery (UK), The Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Australian Center for the Moving Image (AU). Recent residencies and awards include the Villa Romana Testing Grounds Residency (Italy, 2024), and the Delfina Art Foundation (UK, 2025), the 2020 ACMI/Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, the Marten Bequest Scholarship, and the Sidney Power Institute Prize. Her garden project Battlefield is installed permanently at the Augustaschacht Memorial in Lower Saxony, Germany. Her works are held within the permanent collections of the AGNSW, MUMA, and ACMI. Gabriella is part of the collective Atomic Terrain, who have performed and presented at CARA (NYC), the Wende Museum (LA) and within the special project program of Printed Matter Art Book Fair NYC (2024). She studied at the College of Fine Arts and the National Art School, Australia, between 2008-2012, and received an MFA at the Slade School, London in 2018, as recipient of the John Crampton Scholarship. From 2020-23, she was an Associate Lecturer at the RCA London School of Architecture leading the section ‘Practices of Care and Control’.