Kirsten Farrell [she/her] is a queer multidisciplinary artist who attended the ANU School of Art in Canberra and continues to live on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. Her practice encompasses conceptual, object-based installation, textile and performative modes of practice and is nonetheless grounded in painting.

Prior to her Bachelor of Visual Art with Honours (Painting) in 2000, Kirsten completed a Bachelor of Japanese Studies with honours, focussing on translation of contemporary literature. She spent 18 months in Japan during her undergraduate studies, at both Kansai University and Kyoto Seika University, where she learned about Japanese papermaking traditions and began exploring installation in the mode of the mono-ha and gutai movements. Remaining a further 18 months in rural Japan, she began experimenting with urban interventions using plastic objects that queried space and consumer culture and which invited serendipitous conversations with locals who encountered the works (she is a fluent Japanese speaker).

Her PhD in visual art practice at the ANU School of Art in 2016 is titled ‘The Performance of Colour: Material, Time, Language’, and her thesis included a colour divination system, artist book and series of performances called ‘The Vivisector Oracle: A Colour System for Artists and Others in Times of Uncertainty’. Her research drew on the work of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, the American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, and engaged with a wide range of texts including ‘Remarks on Colour’ by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the linguistic survey of colour naming across cultures ‘The World Color Survey’, and the novel ‘The Vivisector’ by Australian Nobel Prize laureate Patrick White.

A Unidee research residency at the Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto in Italy and Albania in 2016 enabled her to further develop installation and performance work, and it was during this time that she began to use plastic in works that comment on human presence and which invited viewers to examine their own feelings about plastic. Her 2023 solo exhibition at ANCA, The Anything You Want Machine proposed a feminist revision of plastic as a material and incorporated painting-like plastic textiles, installations made from plastic and video.