Karla Nixon

Karla Nixon, born in 1990, spent her early childhood on a sugarcane estate in Swaziland before relocating to Durban, South Africa.

Nixon completed her Master’s degree in Fine Art in 2017 at the Durban University of Technology. Her degree focused on transience in the work of paper artists, which she completed Cum Laude.

Nixon has spent the last eight years working within the academic infrastructures of teaching and learning at University level in the Fine Art Department at The Durban University of Technology. She is currently lecturing in the Arts Extended Curriculum Program in the same university.

Nixon’s art practice has thematically crossed a spectrum of topics, but is more often than not routed in the understanding and unpacking of her urban environment and dualities of destruction and creation found within these spaces, often with a bit of humour and some whimsy. Her predominant and preferred medium is paper. She hand-cuts, tears and sculpts intricate images and objects, drawn from her surrounding environments. Her latest work departs from the comforts of the white page, which has become synonymous with Nixon’s aesthetic, as well as a major shift from figurative to abstract. She has boldly introduced explosions of colour created with washes of acrylic paint. Even with the bold introduction of paint and colour the materiality of the paper is still in the fore; creating colourful, textural tapestry like abstract work.

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. Nixon has participated in a number of group shows in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and has had a few solo shows the most recent being, Just Listed, in 2019 at the KZNSA, Durban. Her work is in private collections in South Africa, Lebanon, Australia, Spain and Holland to name a few. As well as in public collections including; the Durban Art Gallery and The National Art Bank.

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