KARLA NIXON
b. 1990, South AfricaKarla Nixon (b. 1990) is a visual artist based in Durban, South Africa, whose practice draws primary impetus from direct material exploration, with paper at its core. She constructs images and objects responding to her surrounding environments-urban, domestic, and natural-by hand-cutting, tearing, sculpting, and reassembling. Her work is grounded in an ongoing investigation of how colour, texture, and fragmentation operate as a language of presence shaping sensorial and emotional encounters.
The work of Nixon embraces tension, transience, and perception: tending to decomposition and reconstruction as critical means through which we operate in the spaces we make and the traces we leave within. Texture becomes a site of intimacy; colour, a catalyst for emotional resonance; and fragments, ways of holding multiplicity without seeking resolution. Thus, she says, “Paper holds a duality that fascinates me-it is fragile and strong, disposable yet archival-and through it I explore how we move through space and what remains after us. ”
Though paper is central to her practice, Nixon’s approach is multidisciplinary in extending into painting, sculpture, mixed media, collage, installation, video, and light. These forms deepen both the conceptual and sensory dimensions of her practice, creating deliberately ambiguous spaces of encounter that invite viewers to dwell in the in-between.
Nixon obtained her Master’s degree in Fine Art (Cum Laude) from the Durban University of Technology in 2017, for which her thesis focused on transience in paper art. She later did an artist residency in Bremen, Germany, from 2017 to 2018. She has been widely recognized and selected for t
he Shanghai Paper Art Biennale in 2023, among others, and is represented both nationally and internationally in notable presentations, such as the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch (2024) and the Spier Light Art Festival (2025).
Her artworks are held in private collections in South Africa, Lebanon, Australia, Spain, and Holland, as well as public collections, including the Durban Art Gallery, the National Art Bank, and the Leridon Collection. Nixon has also been a finalist in both the Sasol and ABSA art awards. In February 2026, Karla Nixon will present in A Grammar of Belonging at THK Gallery, Cape Town.
Courtesy THK Gallery, Cape Town/Cologne.
View Karla Nixon's Artworks
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