The immediacy of a landscape and what surrounds it is confounding: getting to an awaited vista after a long journey leaves us marveling at the vast complexity before us that simultaneously can and cannot be comprehended—our senses firing on all cylinders. Just as these intimate moments with the environment shape us, so do we shape our environments. Mutable Landscapes brings together works of Paula Turmina, Motohiro Takeda, and Shayna Miller with no overtly unified green, ecological agenda; however, these works help us recognize our agency within the jarring fluidity of our ever-changing world.

An upright tree and a naked figure bend backwards, with an exaggerated posture in Paula Turmina’s painting of a bizarre, arid environment. Is this nudist mirroring the tree in an awkward dance? Is the tree imposing itself upon the figure? Or perhaps they are seeking relief in the shade of a tree that stands between the dangling sun in the top left corner of the sparse painting. While nothing is certain, we can project desired narratives based on personal memories of the natural world onto Turmina’s stretched-out entities in their vast, unpopulated landscapes. By contrast, Motohiro Takeda takes materials directly from the natural world to embed its detritus into his fascinating sculptures. Using a Japanese wood-burning technique, the artist meticulously arranges botanical bits in a sometimes linear fashion and other times, places them without apparent logic, which calls to mind the arbitrary pattern of leaves falling to the ground.

Takeda grounds these manipulated, natural remnants in various ways: simply suspending them in his work, sometimes scavenging found materials to layer on top, or even taking petrified wood and making an altar around it. His sculptures create a bewitching terrain through a distinct treatment of natural or ephemeral materials. Finding commonality in this topographic logic, Shayna Miller taps into a textured abstraction that might evoke the rugged, volatile elements of the natural world. Using a rough burlap sack as the substrate, Miller layers and blends thick coats of paint to create fascinating pools of color. Erupting from the plane is a central, bright point of color that resembles the harsh yet beautiful elements of nature—jagged mountain peaks, a long stalactite, and boiling volcanoes. Many of Miller’s surfaces are not just worked, they’re excavated: gashes and craters in the paintings are reminders of just how brutal the natural forces can be in order to make these alluring forms.

While what goes on in our surroundings is perhaps unforgiving, the world is also resilient. Each artist shows how the changing nature of our land leads towards something captivating and profoundly insightful. Turmina placing figures within the landscapes for us to project our own, varied memories onto; Takeda revealing our subtle capacity to manipulate nature for dramatic effect; and Miller’s tectonic compositions and formal rigor bring forth the wonder of geological time that we truly can’t perceive in the form of lively paintings.

In his recent article “The Universal Right to Breathe,” Achille Mbembe argues that “We must reclaim the lungs of our world with a view to forging new ground. Humankind and biosphere are one. Alone, humanity has no future.” Part of that reclamation can perhaps be found by looking outwards towards the natural world, as these three artists do, in order to see just how, collectively, we might be able to shape our shared domain.  

— Bryan Martin

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Paula Turmina (b. 1991, Brazil) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. She holds an MA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art (2021) and a BA from Wimbledon College of Arts (2016). Her practice explores the shifting boundaries between the human body, animals, plants, and the landscape, drawing on planetary thinking, soil ecologies, and speculative fiction. Red hues run through her palette, anchoring the work in her research about the colonial exploitation of brazilwood and the future of Mars, with the attention towards climate futures.

Turmina has exhibited widely, including solo shows in London at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Miami at Andrew Reed Gallery, and Mexico City at Ambar Quijano Gallery, and several group shows, including “Supernova 1572” in Brazil at Yehudi Hollander-Pappi, who represents the artist in the country, and “Surrealism and Witchcraft” in London at Lamb Gallery. She is also the recipient of the The Zsuzsi Roboz Award (2020) and has been the artist in residence at the GIRLPOWER Residency in 2024.



Shayna Miller (b.1997, New Jersey) received her MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, New York, NY in 2024 and her BA in Art and Art History from Drew University, Madison, NJ in 2019. In 2024, Miller had a solo exhibition of her work at the Korn Gallery at Drew University. Miller’s work has also been included in exhibitions at CHART, New York, NY; My Pet Ram, New York, NY; and Thomas Van Dyke Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.



Motohiro Takeda (b. 1982) uses sculpture, ceramics, and photography to explore the impermanent nature of life. He investigates the transient core of time and memory and the space between man and nature in his work, and creates installations to contemplate on mortality.

Takeda is a 2024 AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum. He was awarded the Tierney Fellowship in 2008. He participated in the Artist in Residency program at Baxter St. CCNY in 2011 and at Woodstock Center for Photography in 2015. His work has been exhibited in various venues, including Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami), island gallery (New York), Arsenal Contemporary (New York), Storage Gallery (New York), Ibasho Gallery (Antwerp, Belgium), Unseen Photo Festival in Amsterdam, Photo London, Photo España, among others.

He received his BFA in photography from Parsons School of Design | The New School in 2008 and his MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2023. He was born in Hamamatsu, Japan, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.