[9][10][11] Situated in the contemporary context of global warming, however, her paintings subtly upend such idealized traditions, invoking a sense of accountability in response to the specter of ecological flux and impermanence.

[21][8][10] Her early art centered on environments hovering between painting and sculpture and impermanent conceptual installations that used unusual materials (e.g., ice, trash) and examined contemporary social issues.

[22][23][24][25] New York Times critic Vivien Raynor wrote of the Real Art Ways exhibition, which addressed overpopulation, nuclear war and racism: "Seemingly reluctant to bully her viewers, Kirkland errs on the side of tortuousness and sometimes, of playfulness, but her integrity is unmistakable.

[34][9][17][35] In the 1990s, Kirkland's early artistic focus on impermanence shifted to a consideration of art's lasting power;[21] the change was cemented by a museum exhibition of Dutch Master works, which convinced her to learn to paint in that style.

[17][10] Her initial foray was the "Nature in the Margins" series (1995–99), consisting of realistic paintings of individual, rare animals living in human environments that raised questions about wildlife survival amid overdevelopment.

[21] In 1999, a Sierra Club list of the 100 most-endangered animals in the U.S. crystallized parallel themes in her work—the durability of art and naturalist painting—into a single concept and her first mature series: the "Taxa" works, which catalogued various species groups.

[2] American Scientist writer Anna Lena Phillips noted, "perhaps paradoxically, by removing species from their habitats, the paintings acquire the power to change our perception of the plants and animals within them.

[5][2][3][1] Writers such as Renny Pritikin place Kirkland among a generation of artists reclaiming traditional realist painting and "moving it toward extra-aesthetic ends" and complex, contemporary concepts.

"[1] In later series, Kirkland turned to subjects including aquatic life (e.g., Squat Lobsters, 2021), gravestone lichens, butterflies and birds, phasmid (walking sticks and leaf insects) eggs, and flora.

[17][10][38] Her show "Nudibranchia: Butterflies of the Sea" (Bolinas Museum, 2014) explored those wildly colorful, soft-bodied marine gastropod mollusks in works that included a large canvas arraying 206 of the creatures life-size in rows from smallest (at top) to largest.

[10][4] It included depictions of specimens unnaturally bunched side-by-side, pinned or tagged, such as Bachman's Warblers Redux (2018) and the butterfly Pseudacraea boisduvali (2020), which suggested a wry meta-commentary on the human need to impose taxonomical order onto nature.