ABOUT
Artist Statement
My art practice is rooted in material exploration, where colour, texture, and fragmentation become a language of presence. Through them, I investigate how we engage sensorially and emotionally with the environments we inhabit; urban, domestic, and natural.
I am increasingly drawn to the physical language of materials. Paper, paint, and sculptural forms allow me to unpack ideas around tension, transience, and perception. My process embraces deconstruction and reassembly, mirroring the layered, often fractured nature of lived experience.
Texture becomes a site of intimacy; colour, a catalyst for emotional resonance; fragments, a way of holding multiplicity without resolution. My pieces hover between object and image, surface and structure, inviting the viewer to engage not just visually, but viscerally.
While paper has been a primary medium, valued for its fragility, malleability, and everyday presence, my practice embraces a multidisciplinary approach incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, and light. This allows form and material to deepen both the conceptual and sensory experience of the work, offering multiple entry points into its emotional and conceptual landscape.
These works are spaces of encounter, a site where material, space, and perception meet. They hold ambiguity deliberately, asking to be felt rather than resolved. Not statements, but invitations to inhabit the in-between.
Ultimately, my art is an ongoing investigation of place and presence, how we inhabit, disrupt, and find solace in our surroundings. It is a dialogue about impermanence and resilience, control and surrender, and the complex, often intimate ways we relate to the world around us.
Notes from the Studio
My artistic path has been one of continual exploration and transformation, shaped by both the environments I inhabit and the shifting ideas that capture my curiosity. I am deeply drawn to the textures and colours around me, whether in the urban or natural landscapes, these sensory experiences are often where my work begins.
Over time, I’ve come to appreciate the delicate balance between control and chance in making art. The physical act of tearing paper or layering paint is as much about letting go as it is about intention. This push and pull reflects how I engage with themes of memory, place, and the passage of time, embracing vulnerability and resilience alike.
While paper has played a significant role in my practice, I see it as one tool among many. What truly guides my work is a desire to create pieces that invite quiet reflection and emotional connection, transcending any single material or style.
Ultimately, my art is a conversation, between material and meaning, between viewer and space, offering a gentle invitation to pause, look closer, and find your own story within the layers, texture, experiences or colours.
My inner workings, reflections on the rhythms and rituals of my practice:
Biography
Karla Nixon, born in 1990, spent her early childhood on a sugarcane estate in Swaziland before relocating to Durban, South Africa. She is a Durban based artist who predominantly works with paper. She hand-cuts, tears and sculpts intricate images and objects, drawn from her surrounding environments. She has used this medium to explore a multitude of themes each with underlying notions of Space and Place. Although paper is central to her practice she works across disciplines with painting, sculpture, mixed media, collage, video, and installation.
Nixon completed her Master’s degree in Fine Art with Cum Laude in 2017 at the Durban University of Technology, South Africa. Her degree focused on transience in the work of paper artists. In 2017-2018, Nixon was awarded and completed an artist residency in Bremen, Germany. She has been selected as a finalist in both the Sasol and ABSA art competitions. Nixon has participated in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally, and has had several solo exhibitions, with the most recent being 'One Sunday afternoon' in 2024 at Tamasa Gallery in Durban. She participated in the Shanghai Paper Art Biennale in 2023, and has shown her work at various national and international art fairs, as well as in a museum exhibition at the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch in 2024. Her work is held in private collections in South Africa, Lebanon, Australia, Spain, and Holland, among others, as well as in public collections including the Durban Art Gallery, The National Art Bank and the Leridon Collection Paris. Nixon lectured for over a decade in the Fine Art Department and the Arts Extended Curriculum Program at the Durban University of Technology, and is currently dedicating all her time to her practice.
