
"My art speaks the language of nature, revealing the hidden connections that remind us of our place in life."
Artist Statement
Kayla Marie Anley is an artist working in charcoal, graphite and oils to explore cycles of life, death, and ecological memory. Raised in mid-north America—a region that continues to shape her practice—she draws native animals and plants not only as living subjects, but as imagined remnants of a world altered by time and colonization.
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Her work is rooted in grief and reverence. The stark darkness that surrounds each form evokes both loss and possibility: a visual silence from which each subject emerges. These spaces reflect the parts of her own mind left searching—fragments shaped by a longing for a version of the land she never got to see.
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While studying art history, Kayla wrote her senior symposium on John James Audubon. Reading his journals, she saw through his eyes a vision of North America before the full scale of westward expansion—an environment seemingly endless in abundance, wild and whole. That vision haunts her work. Each animal she draws is both a witness and a question: What have we lost? What are we still losing?
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Symbolic elements—eight-pointed stars, voided eyes, bird halos, human teeth—run through her drawings like threads in a memory. They speak of ancestral connection, consumption, spiritual longing, and the quiet authority of nature itself. These motifs form a visual language through which Kayla meditates on the boundaries between the living and the gone, the seen and the imagined.
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In addition to her studio practice, Kayla is an arts educator and co-founder of Studio Sienna, where she teaches drawing and scientific illustration. Her work seeks to connect viewers to the cycles of life and death, and to remind them of their place in a living, breathing world.
