Kira Doutt
MW : Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
KD : My name is Kira Doutt, and I’m an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. I’ve been living here for about ten years now. I work primarily in painting, though I also work through ideas in sculpture, ceramics, and installation. I split my time between being in my studio and teaching art.
I’m originally from coastal Massachusetts and I moved to Los Angeles after finishing my undergraduate degree at MassArt in Boston. I later attended California Institute of the Arts for my MFA from 2017 to 2019.
Those two school experiences shaped me in different ways. MassArt felt very material-focused, while CalArts was much more conceptual. In my current practice, I’m really trying to braid those two approaches together, moving between material sensitivity and conceptual thinking. That tension has been really generative for me.
MW : How did your interest in art begin?
KD : My interest in art started at a really young age. I was a very creative kid, and I had the benefit of growing up surrounded by nature, which gave me a lot of space to explore my imagination.
I was always outside and some of my earliest interests came from observing the natural world - the shapes of flowers, making shapes in snow, drawing in sand, creating patterns with shells and rocks. I was always drawing, sewing, making paper dolls and entire worlds for them. I feel in hindsight like that was the beginning of my practice. I was always paying attention to how things formed and how they could be reimagined. I also grew up with very creative parents, my mom’s a fiber artist and in the healing arts and my dad worked in oceanography so my brother and I were around a lot of creative and interesting ideas and people.
MW : Coastal wetlands and marshes resist fixed boundaries between land and water. How does this shifting landscape shape the way you construct space and composition in painting?
KD : Growing up, marshlands were all around me. I’m from a small town on Cape Cod, and my backyard opened up through woods directly onto a marsh. I remember being fascinated by how it transformed daily - at high tide, it would become almost lake-like, and then at low tide, it turned into mud flats where you could walk out and find shells and debris that had washed in.
In my painting practice, I think about that constant state of flux. I often work with a kind of fixed frame, almost like a camera that stays still, while everything inside it shifts and transforms. It’s a way of holding a single space while allowing multiple temporal or environmental conditions to unfold within it.
Since having lived in Los Angeles for ten years now, my relationship to that landscape has changed. When I return, it feels much more charged: more alive, or unstable. The paintings come out of that distance. They’re built from memory, sketches, and fragments of observation, which allows for a kind of slippage into something more surreal.
Memory becomes a material in itself. It lets me hold onto the strangeness of the place rather than trying to render it as something fixed or purely descriptive.
oil on linen
oil on linen
MW : Your figures seem caught between agency and repetition.
Are they resisting environmental or historical forces, or revealing complicity within them?
KD : The figures in my paintings are often loosely based on myself, or on women in my family: my mother, my grandmother, but they’re not drawn from direct references. I usually invent them, sometimes using my own body as a loose guide, so they end up existing somewhere between specificity and anonymity.
I’m also really interested in where these figures are situated. The marshes I’m painting are in close proximity to early colonial landing sites, so they carry a lot of historical weight. I think about different timescales collapsing, imagining a figure from 1650 coexisting with someone from the present moment.
Clothing often anchors a figure in a specific time, so keeping the clothing ambiguous or depicting a nude figure allows for more ambiguity. I want the viewer to feel uncertain, like the figure could belong to multiple temporalities at once. I'm interested in using the figures as a way to move through history, memory, and place simultaneously. And having their actions be strange or absurd can reinforce this challenge in locating time.
MW : The feminized body has a long history of being aligned with nature. How are you negotiating or challenging that tradition in your work?
KD : I’m really drawn to this question. It's a question my professor Leslie Dick at CalArts asked me and I think about it often, and it’s something I don’t feel resolved in. It’s more of an ongoing tension in the work.
The alignment of the feminized body with nature has a long history in Western art, where women are often positioned as symbolic, passive, or closer to the “natural” world in contrast to culture. Feminist artists in the 1960s and 70s both critiqued and, at times, reclaimed that association, so it holds a kind of complexity. It can be generative, but it’s also deeply tied to frameworks that have been limiting.
I’m also thinking about how the female figure has been used within colonial visual culture as a kind of allegorical device. In images promoting Manifest Destiny, like John Gast’s American Progress, the figure becomes a vehicle for expansion, guiding movement across land in a way that naturalizes conquest.
In my work, I’m interested in disrupting that. These figures exist within a highly charged landscape, but instead of moving outward or claiming space, they’re often staying, repeating, or slowly sinking into it. The landscape remains, while the figures shift, cycle, or dissolve within it.
I’m drawn to a sense of the body not as separate from the environment, but moving through it, blending into it, being shaped by it. I think often of the work of Ana Mendieta and the way her body merges with the earth, not as something passive, but as a way of marking presence, absence, and transformation.
There’s something perhaps quieter and more ambiguous that I’m trying to do in these paintings and I’m not trying to resolve that tension so much as stay within it and let it remain visible.
MW : Myth appears alongside ecological inquiry. Are your depicted narratives emerging from personal mythology, broader cultural references, or is it something discovered through painting itself?
KD : I’m interested in pointing toward myth, but not depicting any specific myth in a direct way. Because the paintings sit within a tradition of figurative, narrative, almost allegorical painting, there can be an impulse to try to locate a familiar story within them. But I’m actually more interested in resisting that. Rather than reinforcing a known myth or slipping into a clear narrative, I want the work to remain open and a bit unresolved.
In these paintings, it feels less like the figures are carrying the narrative, and more like the landscape itself holds it. There’s something almost strange or diffuse about that. The repetition of the setting starts to build its own internal logic, so the “myth” begins to live inside the landscape rather than being imposed onto it by the figures.
A lot of these images come to me pretty fully formed. While I’m driving, or right before falling asleep, or even in the shower. So instead of overanalyzing why a figure is doing a specific action, I tend to follow that instinct and trust it. I think of it as letting the subconscious lead, while also feeding it through reading, research, and looking closely at other artwork that inspires me.
That balance between intuition and research feels important. It allows the work to stay open, while still being in dialogue with broader conversations.
MW : How do aspects of time function in your paintings?
KD : Spending extended time in the marsh made me aware of how radically it changes, not just day to day, but hour to hour. The tides, the moon cycles, the seasons. Everything is in constant motion. At times, it feels like a completely different landscape each time you enter it. It almost feels like moving through different realms.
I once tried to do a plein air watercolor every day for a month in August to capture that cycle. I would go at different times of day, set up a chair in the reeds, and try to paint. During a full moon high tide, I once had to sit on the edge of the woods because the water was so deep. And one time during Low tide, painting quickly became unbearable with mosquitoes, the smells, and dead, washed-up creatures exposed out of the mud.
And I became really interested in how the marsh holds both this birth and decay simultaneously. Dead organisms wash up there, but it’s also a site of intense fertility, a place where many forms of life begin. I started thinking of it almost like an organ, like a lung or a womb, something that is constantly breathing, holding, and releasing.
That led me to think about cycles more broadly. Within my own life, familial relationships, the span of human lives across this coast, and within geological time.
Landscapes are never fixed; they’re always in the process of becoming something else. Painting becomes a way to hold multiple temporalities at once.
The immediate, the remembered, and the speculative future.
MW : Marshes are increasingly threatened ecosystems. How do you negotiate ecological urgency without the work becoming didactic or overtly illustrative?
KD : Wetlands have historically been treated as expendable. Drained, built over, or dismissed as wasteland. Cities like Boston and New York are literally built on former wetland systems.At the same time, marshes are incredibly complex ecosystems.
They’re sites of contradiction - teeming with life but saturated with decay, resistant to development but deeply fertile, uncomfortable for human bodies but essential for climate regulation.
I’m interested in those contradictions, and in the sensory experience of being in a marsh - the sulfur smell, the biting insects, the feeling of your body sinking into mud. It’s not an easy landscape to dominate or even fully perceive.
Rather than illustrating the ecological crisis directly, I try to create a space where the viewer can feel the strangeness and significance of the landscape and feel embodied within it.
I’m also thinking about historical American landscape painting traditions like the Hudson Valley school and The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole, which framed landscape as a site of progress and expansion. My work pushes against that, returning instead to a landscape that resists expansion and asks for a different kind of attention. One rooted in staying, rather than moving forward.
MW : What does your current workspace look like, and what is essential for you to have in your studio?
KD : My current studio is in Highland Park in Los Angeles, and it’s larger than the spaces I’ve had in the past, which has been a huge shift. I can have around five paintings up at once, and being able to see the work together like that feels like a real gift. I usually work there three to four days a week, in between teaching. In terms of what’s essential, tea is a big one. I drink a lot of it. I’m also studying to be an herbalist, so I bring different blends into the studio, which has become part of my routine.
It’s also important for me to be able to step away. I can walk to a nearby coffee shop, or just walk around the neighborhood if I get stuck. Painting, for me, is a lot of looking and thinking, and then a smaller portion of actually painting, so those breaks are really necessary.
I also keep a lot of art books in the studio. If I hit a wall, I’ll turn to an artist I really admire, and that usually helps me move through whatever I’m stuck on.
MW : What does your current workspace look like, and what is essential for you to have in your studio?
MW : Do you have any upcoming projects or show? Or is there anything else you would like to tell us about ?
KD : In May, I’ll be attending the The Arctic Circle residency in Svalbard, Norway, where I’ll be on a sailing vessel for about two weeks. I’m really excited about it.
On my dad's side my family has a connection to the Arctic through scientific research which I’ve explored in past bodies of work. Both of my grandfather and my grandmother conducted research in the Arctic in the late 1930s, and my father studied sea ice there in the 1990s. So it feels meaningful to go there and paint, digest, and process that landscape through my own lens and practice.
I’ve been developing ideas for new work that connect to themes of expedition, colonialism, and landscape. It definitely builds on my marshland paintings, but also feels like a shift, maybe a new direction. The timing feels right. I think I’m reaching the end of that body of work, at least in the way I’ve been approaching it, and this residency feels like an opening into something new.
MW : Do you have any upcoming projects or show? Or is there anything else you would like to tell us about ?