dialogue
Paula Turmina | Artist
November 2025
6 min read
Paula Turmina’s practice unfolds across painting, printmaking, analog film, and writing, each medium offering a distinct way for ideas to surface. Painting remains her centre, while printmaking and her collaborative project plantaphilia open other pathways of exploration. Writing, often tucked into sketchbooks as poetic fragments, anchors the emotional core of her work.
Ants, a recurring presence in her paintings, act as both agents of resistance and quiet disruptors. Emerging from readings on the Atlantic Forest and memories of growing up in Brazil, they function as small but powerful guides, drawing viewers closer, revealing hidden paths, and connecting myth, scale, and history.
Across cultures, Paula’s work lives in the tension between intuition and intention. Figures merge with landscapes, bodies dissolve and re-form, and nature becomes a site of transformation. Her paintings trace this ongoing exchange, a space where memory, ecology, and imagination converge.
Paula Turmina. Photo by Jon C Archdeacon
How do you manage the balance between painting, printmaking, analog filmmaking, and writing in your daily artistic practice?
”Painting is my main practice, it is what I spend most of my time doing and thinking about. The interest in printmaking is something that goes alongside it but it's more limited. I love the process of printmaking, especially etching and aquatint. It is different from painting and feels more calculated. As for the analog film, I am mostly working with this medium for the collaborative project called ‘plantaphilia’, I co-founded with Iria Suarez Martinez. The project consists of analog films that explore the life of plants and its relationship with humans through hand-painted analog film and sound.
Lastly, writing is my way of externalizing ideas, feelings, and it usually happens in my sketchbooks as a sort of poetry. Sometimes it makes its way into the work as titles, accompanying texts, or small publications. Even when it doesn’t, it remains one of the most important parts of my practice. Though not a diary per se, it is a recurrent exercise for uncovering ideas and understanding the emotional dimension of the process.”
Paula Turmina, Communion, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm, 2024. Photography courtesy of Zachary Balber.
Ants appear in your work frequently. What do they represent for you, and how do they contribute to the narrative of your work?
“I first started painting ants after reading “With broadax and firebrand” by Warren Dean, where he tells the story of how the Atlantic Forest has been destroyed. He describes how ants (Atta genus) would eat crops planted with European seeds overnight, making it more difficult for Europeans to settle and, in my view, resisting them from the ground up. In 1587, the chronicler Gabriel Soares de Souza was the first European to register the invaders' astonishment with the voracity of ants: “If it weren’t for the leafcutter ants, many parts of Spain and Portugal would be emptied in order to populate Brazil, for everything that one might want will grow in it, but this damnation prevents it, so that men lose their taste for planting any more than they must in order to survive on the land.”
Beyond seeing them as agents of resistance, I became fascinated by their capacity in relation to scale: the way they organize with the potential to disrupt a system, carry things far heavier than their bodies, or even spiral into death. In my paintings, they serve as a tool to draw the viewer closer to the surface. They may not be noticeable when you first see the whole work, but gradually you start following their path, which sometimes reveals a secondary drawing of a human figure or other symbols.
In Brazil, I grew up surrounded by them. There are myths about their behaviour and they can also be a sign of turbulence coming - be it superstition or not, they are part of our lives, vocabulary and metaphors.”
Installation view: Paula Turmina, Terrenos Maleables, solo show at Ambar Quijano Gallery. Photo by Ramiro Chaves.
What role does intuition play in your practice versus deliberate planning or research?
”I don’t have a fixed method of research, nor do I believe in absolute unconscious expression. For me, the work happens somewhere in between. Something I read might spark an idea, and once I start putting it down on paper or canvas it can lead me elsewhere. It’s a back-and-forth process that I personally find hard to track.
I love losing myself in drawing, it’s where I allow myself to play the most. At the same time, it’s important for me to keep a sense of balance and structure in the work, because that helps me to believe in it. I think it’s only the belief that something beautiful, magical, or interesting can happen that makes me want to continue. If I’m not in it, I get stuck immediately; I have to trust before trying.”
Paula Turmina, Growth and decay, Oil on linen, 40 x 35 cm, 2022. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Having studied in Brazil and the UK, how did navigating these diverse cultural environments influence and shape your artistic voice?
”This is a difficult question because my perspective is shaped by personal experience: growing up in the countryside of southern Brazil until my early twenties, and then living for the past twelve years in London, a multicultural city in itself. I enjoy bringing the cultural aspects of Brazil to my life in the UK, it feels in many ways disruptive, and all together a different path that allows me to play with these different sets of references, skills and language.
The UK has given me so much to learn. I am always in awe of the privilege of accessing museums for free and seeing works I had only read or heard about while growing up. My time here has also been marked by important conversations that helped me see my own country from a different perspective. Most of the people I know are from other countries and, like me, chose to live in the UK, which creates a kind of community within this place.
As for my practice, I'm influenced by the things I see and am in conversation with, including gallery shows, artists, and museums in London. At the same time, I'm influenced by my memory of and interest in the complexity of nature (forest ecosystems) in Brazil. It's not just these things but these are some examples. I think of how the practice of representation through painting in the West has been a form of devotion, or search for beauty, but also control, and exclusion. And I try to approach it with the awareness of its history.
I think of the danger of representation as a colonial tool, that has been done, and I also see the potential of it being a manifestation of dreams, of speculating possible and impossible worlds, of challenging some of these ways of seeing. And being part of these two cultures helps me explore these questions and hopefully bridge it in my work.”
Installation view: Paula Turmina, Terrenos Maleables, solo show at Ambar Quijano Gallery. Photo by Ramiro Chaves.
In your artworks, figures often dissolve into or merge with the landscape, what does this merging signify for you?
“Yes, I would say there is an attempt to dissolve, or to become the landscape. Yet when I look at these forms, they seem to remain whole after being imagined. I often reflect on how my gesture and way of painting, despite my intentions, never allow them to fully dissolve.
The figures, plants, and insects are all in the process of becoming each other. They give something of themselves and absorb something from the other - through looking, touching, adapting, mimicking, detaching, surrendering. For me, this is a reminder that we are all part of the same ecosystem. I think about evolution and devolution, infection and absorption, multiplication of bodies, ingestion, exposure, all as part of this ongoing exchange.
The tension between these polarities softens in moments of transformation. In that in-between lies the act of painting, where pictorial motifs merge into the poetry of an image. The painting itself becomes the trace of this process.“
Paula Turmina, Sheltering, Oil on canvas, 145 x 125 cm, 2025. Photo courtesy of MAMA Projects and the artist.
Recommended
