Artist Kirsten Stolle Takes Chemical Corporations to Task
“My mom was dressed up as this giant strawberry with fish gills.”
It was this childhood memory that sticks with Asheville-based visual artist Kirsten Stolle as a pivotal moment that would later influence her work. It came during the mid-1990s during a protest in Santa Cruz, California, against American multinational chemical company Monsanto introducing genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs, into the country’s food supply.
“I went down to the protest, and my mom was dressed up as this giant strawberry with fish gills,” Stolle said. “It sounds bizarre and the reason she and her kind of cohorts did that is at the time, Monsanto was trying to genetically engineer a strawberry with a flounder gene to withstand cold temperatures in an effort to allow farmers to produce more fruit.”
She let out a small laugh. “It sounds like science fiction; it’s bizarre.”
Later in life, Stolle would become engrossed in the world of chemicals, pesticides and GMOs. These interests connected her already artistic nature to spur a style of activist art that incorporates environmentalism into collages, tapestries and other works that warn of the impacts that corporations such as Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Bayer and Shell have on our food systems through the use of chemicals, petroleum, pesticides and the like.
As a professional artist over the last two decades, Stolle’s work has been featured in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Charlotte Observer.
Her art has been shown near and far, with exhibits at the Asheville Art Museum, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, the Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, now The NC Museum of Art – Winston Salem.
Stolle also had a solo exhibit at NOME in Berlin and one of her pieces, “Last Supper,” will soon be flown to Poland for display there.
But before then, it will finish out its run as part of her current exhibit, “Under the Influence,” on display in the Projective Eye Gallery at UNC Charlotte’s Dubois Center in Uptown through Oct. 17. Stolle will be at the Projective Eye Gallery on Sept. 11 for a reception and artist conversation with curator Adam Justice.