Feature by Eli Schalet
Photos by Moksha Akil
(Pairs well with “Wild Mountain Honey” by Steve Miller Band, your favorite goat’s milk gouda and crackers [or some casu martzu if you find yourself reading this in Sardinia], and a glass of chocolate milk.)
Julia is a visual artist from San Fransisco in the class of 2027 at Columbia College also studying physics and archeology. She is a painter (oil, acrylic, watercolor), tattoo artist, illustrator, welder, leatherworker, jewelry maker, glassworker, photographer, and bacterial bio-artist at Columbia Biomedical Engineering. Speaking with her on the steps of St. John’s Cathedral, it's almost as if she can’t not create. “You give me a material, and I'll give you art. I guess for me, art is just anything that I work with my hands.” Her art experiments with how we create memories, their preservation, their distortion; she wants to create these memories synthetically.
As the Thursday evening sun leaves us on a blue-gray and cold Amsterdam Ave, Julia tells me about her bio-art in between Mount Sinai sirens, a hand in her bleached hair. Working out of the Danino Lab – a studio part of Columbia’s Synthetic Biological Systems Lab – Kirby uses microbiology techniques that are usually found in scientific research to make art. “Instead of using bacteria to make a drug that cures cancer, you're making bacteria look pretty. Way better (she laughs sarcastically).” After extracting strains of bacteria with a solution from samples usually sourced from natural environments, like for her ongoing project focalizing national parks, she’ll pipette that solution onto an agar plate that helps the bacteria grow. She then incubates these, sometimes just overnight, other times for up to two weeks, and returns them to colonies of bacteria of all different shapes and colors. Once the bacteria has covered the agar plate she scans it and lets the plate dry out, sometimes adding chemical stains or food dye to augment the plate’s coloring. Other times though, like some of her recent work with bright orange and yellow bacterial samples from musical instruments, she’ll leave the plates with their natural color.
This process is highly selective, and she often goes through many iterations of plates experimenting with different strains or agar mediums, or changing the nutrient mediums or broths. When she inoculates a plate with bacteria, it’s in this malleable liquid culture that she can manipulate and create shapes with. “Recently, I made a plate with a smiley face.” With all this experimentation, Kirby says she sees herself more as a scientist in the lab than an artist. The beauty jumps out from the natural patterns, then she recreates them.
Julia’s scientific creativity stems from her Northern California roots. Up until middle school, she focused her energy mostly on the fine arts, yet was also inspired by the nature around her and captivated by at-home chemistry kits; the tension between science and art in her life was always present, but it wasn’t until she discovered a warehouse in Oakland that housed an industrial arts studio that the two collided. Going every summer with her friends, she immersed herself in the more mechanical processes of artistic creation. “Up until then, it was mostly drawing and painting, and I was still doing that, but I think this warehouse made me realize ‘Wow, there's so much science that can be applied to art, and art that can be applied to science.’” It is now that we must issue a sizable ‘thank you’ to her high school biology teacher Christine Bois, who introduced the young artist to the field of bio-art through a lab one day in class. “[We had] all these colorful bacteria, and like, ‘You can make a flower with bacteria’. And I [thought] ‘This is so novel”, at the time I was like, this is really cool. It was a cute, fun science experiment. I need to go tell her that I'm working [in bio-art] because she's literally gonna pass out.”
Often when creating her plates, Kirby tries to pick bacteria that are particularly motile, meaning their growth moves around the plate significantly. “My favorite species that I've found is called bacillus piscis” (she identifies the strain through sequencing) “and it grows very beautifully in this spider-like formation on MRS. I found it because I collected dirt from Grand Teton. I went to Jenny Lake and got this strain of bacteria, and it's beautiful. And it was sequenced from, [the muscle of] this Antarctic fish!”
When Julia is satisfied with a plate she’ll cast it in PDMS (a translucent silicone preservative). But regardless of the outcome, she keeps all of the plates. Those that she doesn’t cast eventually dry out. “It's just kind of wrinkly, and it's not beautiful, but it's also not ugly. The plate is always aging. If you look at the work of previous plates that were made years ago they're still changing shape, even now.”
This transformation of the physical form, or distortion of image, is present almost everywhere in Kirby’s artwork, but especially in her tattooing. “Recently, a lot of the tattoos that I'm doing are copies of this childhood illustration. I did a tattoo on my mom that was an illustration my brother had made when he was little. I tattooed like a star on myself. It's very much in this childlike, kind of fat lines, distorted shapes. There's a beauty in the imperfections.” Particularly with her tattoo for her mother, she felt a strong meaning in the fusion of mother, daughter, and son through an atemporal artwork on an aging body, almost a connection to her mother’s past self via maternity. It was her mother who also taught her how to watercolor in elementary school, setting the foundation for Julia’s artistic journey, or rather, explosion. In this sense, it’s come full circle in the form of permanent ink.
This comparison between the agent of agar and tattooing is also a strong parallel for how Julia thinks about memory, a core tenet of her artistry. Her eyes light up when she remembers a quote from the introduction of photographer and activist Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency:
“Memory allows an endless flow of connections. Stories can be rewritten, memory can’t. If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the experience of memory, a story without end. I want to be able to experience fully, without restraint. People who are obsessed with remembering their experiences usually impose strict self-disciplines. I want to be uncontrolled and controlled at the same time. The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.”
“She's kind of putting into words how I think about memory, and how I think about my art. Because I feel like my memory is not great, and I often distort memories of people, places and things. I think my art is me searching for the preservation of the past. That's why I deal with so much scrapbooking. It's why I obsessively keep the train tickets and the receipts whenever I travel.”
This thread is what Kirby uses to weave her infinite spiderweb of mediums and disciplines, connecting the academic with the artistic and everything in between, hoping to catch as much authentic experience in her ‘synthetic memory’ as possible. But she doesn’t always stick to staunch realism; often, authentic replication of the subjective mind’s warping of past events is just as necessary. I mentioned to Julia how I find this distortion in her paintings especially, and she agreed. “80% of the paintings that I make are based off of this [image] in my mind. So when I'm painting something, I'm not observing this physical landscape. I'm imagining this landscape in my mind and painting from that memory,” a memory beautifully warped and twisted by subjectivity.
Julia cites Max Beckmann (showing me The Night and Family Picture, bodies twisting in hyperbolized personality) and Edward Hopper (the famous Nighthawks, Gas, his lighthouses) as her main inspirations, especially with how they distort space. “With Max Beckmann, it's a very clear distortion of space where I'm like, ‘Wow, this is so interesting, how you've made me feel very uncomfortable with these people, but also, like, intrigued.’ It's wonderful. And then with Edward Hopper, the way that he [paints] solitude and the emptiness of this space. Every single time he paints it has this sense of nostalgia.”
This distortion manifests materially in her leatherwork and jewelry. Julia often takes discarded materials and turns them into wearable art, usually gifting them to friends for birthday gifts. “I'm like, ‘If you don't take this, you hate me.’ even though what I'm giving you is literally trash, but I made it into art.” This fascination with trash came from an archive photography class she took freshman year, investigating how we remember photos (which are often as dishonest as they are honest), how we preserve an archive, and what a selective archive is. Kirby saw trash as a clear archive of our environment, accentuating the contrast between today's trash and the trash of the same communities some 200 years ago, culminating in a photo book on the subject.
We laugh about the elusive and confusing nature of nostalgia, and its similarly manipulative effects. “I look back at the bags that I made in middle school, and I'm like, bro, you were so weird. That's also how we're looking back at fashion cycles, like how we're remembering indie sleaze. The indie sleaze that is making a comeback now is so different from what it actually was. I think that's also a part of where I struggle with my art, because I want to capture everything, but I can't. And so how do we select what's important and what's not, and what's worth telling or communicating? I can't preserve every memory. I can't keep this conversation we're having right now. But will I keep this bowl?” (she gestures to her new empty poke bowl) “Maybe, but how? This is why I'm into archeology, this interpretation of what remains, or this interpretation of a culture or a society based on what remains and the physical manifestation of that.”
Julia Kirby posts all her art on her Instagram account @juliamakesartz, where she also takes commissions and tattoo bookings through DMs. Julia’s ongoing musical instrument project with the Danino Lab will experiment with programming code that can combine bio-art with music generated from bacterial patterns. The Lab will also be exhibiting her bio-art along with others at the Mosesian Center for the Arts in Watertown, Massachusetts from November 15 - January 03, 2025. And don’t be shy to ask her about it in person as well. “I'll be around campus selling my art!”