Nicomi Nix Turner's solo exhibition, Writhing & Withering, opens in just under a week!  Here is a look into her studio as she puts the final touches on her latest collection where she tackles a new technique—finishing her works using beeswax, resin, and oil medium—that gives the work an even dreamier, otherworldly feel.

Click here to learn more about the exhibition.

Ginger Rudolph and Nicomi Nix Turner* guide us through with their thoughts . . . 

Nicomi "Nix" Turner is an artist based out of Northern California, recognized for her intricately detailed black-and-white graphite illustrations that invoke surreal understandings of the connections between nature, alchemy, mythology, decay and birth.

The botanical world and strong female representations hold sway in Turner’s work, suspended between movement and stillness, entangling themselves into the symbolic lore of her hyper-realized stories. Her subjects’ breath quietly existing in an aura created in layers of depth and texture, threading a ground on which to commune with ancestries of myths and legends.

In her new pieces for Writhing & Withering, “Fruit plays the protagonist consumed by both the fearless and ignorant alike.” Here’s where Turner turns gorgeously dark and romantic in this found place where conjuring desire is left out to rot, worn in defiance, caught sweetly passing the lips, and dangling from mouths in the midst of subtle revelations. The works feast on the symbolic devices Turner has carried throughout previous works – an offering sacrifice for renewal.

In many tales the consumer emerges changed for the better and generally more mature in some way. In this realm “the consumption of fruit leaves mortality withering – holds the eater writhing in hallucinatory suspension”. Like a scene out of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, where fruit is also the protagonist, the young character, Laura eats the goblins’ fruits and grows older afterwards, but it isn’t by learning and getting wiser. Laura has eaten the fruit and now she knows its taste, but it damages her in a way. “I ate my fill, yet my mouth waters still”, Rossetti’s Laura says desperately and listlessly to her sister; who is ultimately her savior. Her craving for the fruit becomes like that of an addict, she writhes as her inability to be satisfied causes her to be completely debilitated.  

Turner, in turn, explores the cultural and ideological meanings of fruit in celebration of nature and abundance while acknowledging its darker side with devices that carry weight regardless of her subjects’ innate gifts or abilities, all while securing us, the viewer, in a visual inability to be sated.

“I ate my fill, yet my mouth waters still.”

*where quoted

Please contact sara@paradigm-gallery.com if you are interested in receiving the digital collector preview when it is available for this exhibition, as well as for press inquiries.