Anna May Kirk

About the work

Shelf Life is a new public sculpture by Anna May Kirk developed in collaboration with the Australian National Botanic Gardens and the National Seed Bank.

Emerging from Kirk’s participation in a seed deposit at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in October 2025, Shelf Life investigates seed preservation as a strategy for climate resilience, asking what it means to safeguard a life at the scale of a seed.

The sculpture is composed on two planted bronze seed forms, developed in dialogue with botanists and seed scientists, resting upon an aluminium shelf-life base. Suspended between dormancy and growth, archive and organism, Shelf Life positions seeds as living technology for navigating uncertainty, embodying a collective care in futures yet to emerge.

Images

About the artist

Anna May Kirk 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.

Represented by

COMA Gallery