About Karla Nixon

Karla Nixon is a Durban based artist working predominantly in paper, hand-cutting, tearing, and sculpting intricate images and objects drawn from her surrounding environments. Born in 1990 on a sugarcane estate in Swaziland before relocating to Durban, her relationship to landscape and material runs through a practice that also spans painting, sculpture, mixed media, video, and installation.

Her work is held in private collections around the world and in public collections including the Durban Art Gallery, the National Art Bank, and the Leridon Collection, Paris. She has exhibited at the Shanghai Paper Art Biennale (2023) and in a museum exhibition at the Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch (2024), alongside numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, most recent solo exhibition being One Sunday Afternoon at Tamasa Gallery, Durban (2024). She has been a finalist in both the Sasol and ABSA art competitions.

Nixon completed her Master's degree in Fine Art with Cum Laude in 2017 at the Durban University of Technology, and undertook an artist residency in Bremen, Germany in 2017-2018. She lectured for over a decade in the Fine Art Department and Arts Extended Curriculum Program at the Durban University of Technology, and now works full-time from her studio in Durban.

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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.

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.

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.

​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.

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.

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.