Karla Nixon
Durban, KwaZulu Natal
Nixon is a South African artist. Although paper is usually central to her practice she works across disciplines with painting, sculpture and installation etc.
MessageKarla Nixon was born in 1990 in Durban South African, however she spent her early childhood on a sugarcane estate in Swaziland before relocating to Durban. She is a Durban based artist who predominantly works with paper. She hand-cuts 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 in 2017 at the Durban University of Technology, South Africa. Her degree focused on transience in the work of paper artists, which she completed with Cum Laude. During her studies, she received a few awards, namely the Sam Newton Trophy and the Deans Merit award, and was awarded an NRF Scholarship. Nixon was awarded and completed a 3-month artist residency in Bremen, Germany, in 2017-18. She has been selected as a finalist in both the Sasol and ABSA art competitions a number of times. Nixon has participated in a number of group shows in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and has had a few small solo shows the most recent being, Just Underfoot, in 2022 at the Lizamore, Fairland Gallery, Johannesburg. Her work is in a number of private collections in South Africa, Lebanon, Australia, Spain and Holland. As well as in public collections including; the Durban Art Gallery and The National Art Bank. Nixon is currently a lecturer in the Arts Extended Program at The Durban University of Technology.
Statement
My practice, and the conceptual underpinning has shaped and shifted with my lived experiences. It has explored a multitude of themes such as middle-class white suburbia, philosophical concepts around transience, ideas around home through a capitalist lens and through a more personal and theoretical lens, and concepts of material culture focusing specifically on textiles. These areas of exploration, although seemingly varied, are threaded together by the underlying theme of space and place; the human condition to find our space and/or place, define it, find sanctuary in it and use/abuse it.
Working predominantly with paper, manifesting in artefacts both 2D and 3D, my work often blurs delineating categories; it sits between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, a painting and sculpture, a collage and a textile, a craft and art. It is this liminal space that inspires and sometimes informs my approach and conceptual thought. Although paper is usually at the fore I work across disciplines with painting, sculpture, mixed media, collage, video, and installation.
All Artworks and images ©2023 Karla Nixon
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