Paula Turmina, Picking Worlds (2021)

Picking worlds, 2021, Pigmented Indian ink pen on paper, 20x13cm

About Paula Turmina

Paula Turmina is an artist living and working in London. She completed her BA (Hons) in Painting at Wimbledon College of Fine Arts, UAL, in 2016, and is currently enrolled in the second year of MA Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. In 2019, Turmina was awarded a residency programme with Winsor & Newton in collaboration with The Fine Art Collective, and was the recipient of the Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship with the Chelsea Arts Club Trust. She has exhibited at the Fundación Cultural de Providencia in Chile, and in several group shows in the UK, including at Saatchi Gallery, London, Offshoot Gallery, London, Exposed Arts Projects, London, and The Crypt Gallery, London.

Turmina’s work explores mythology and magic realism, in order to speculate around new future perspectives. Through a range of diverse media including painting, analogue film and sculpture, she creates expansive, imaginary visuals drawn from her personal experience, ecological issues, and Latin America’s colonial past.

Turmina’s research investigates how art-making operates as worldbuilding, and within belief systems, as well as how it seeks to form a different relationship between living organisms that inhabit the earth. Often extrapolating and observing the absurdity of these relationships, she combines different visual elements from human, animal and plant-like characteristics. She also takes into account the connection between the past and the present in Brazil, where she grew up. The artist creates an image as a way to develop critical thinking, and of creating a ground of unlimited potential for staging meanings without finding concrete answers.