RAIR | 2021-22

Kate Turner | West Chester, OH

Kate Turner is a visual artist and writer from West Chester, Ohio. She uses various art making processes including sculpture, installation, film, fashion, and performance to abstract memories and experiences she has from growing up as the product of a transracially adopted child in the Midwest United States. Through her art practice, she reflects on what it was like forging an identity in a place that claimed to be color blind. Through her storytelling, she hopes to examine contemporary issues surrounding identity, race, and gender. She received a BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2016 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in sculpture and extended media in 2019. Turner attended the Galveston Artist Residency 2020-2021 before coming to RAiR.  

The experience of frequent moves and re-location have become an important element in Turner’s work. She examines notions of “hometown,” bringing together the uncanny remnants of a fractured narrative into fusion. Her installation provides a backdrop of aesthetic comfort as the guest can explore perceptive shifts, expand consciousness, or simply relax in a place of contemplation. In her exhibition “Somewhere That’s Green” at the Roswell Museum, Turner utilized the power of story and how “in between” spaces can be the most fruitful in providing growth. The Midwest United States is used as a cultural form inverted to see what strange oddities tumble out. Viewers are invited to walk through a twirling display of an upside-down landscape of Turner’s Ohio corn stalks. Listen to the stalks as they whisper her secrets and tell her coming-of-age stories about finding identity as an adopted child. “How many similar stories come from all the hometowns she has been in?” she wonders.  

“In my installations I use space to be critical. I find it interesting how an object within a space can ask questions and demand action from its viewer. For this project, instead of taking or asking, I wanted to create a space that gives. I used to ask so much of my hometown in the Midwest. I wanted it to tell me who I was supposed to be and help me as an adopted child to define myself. For the longest time I thought it wasn’t meeting my demands. ‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ I would always say. I kept feeling like I didn’t belong or there wasn’t room for people who looked like me or acted like me. Looking back now, I think home met all my expectations and more. I just needed the reality shift of moving and distance to be able to see it. See the spaces I had carved for myself, and the room hometown gave me to do so. By sharing stories, I believe we find connections with one another that are invaluable to creating more inclusive places.” 

www.k84art.com

Roswell Museum

Rair exhibition • Kate Turner “Somewhere That’s Green” •May 6 - July 3, 2022

Below, a short video about Kate Turner and her solo exhibition Somewhere That’s Green, at the Roswell Museum.