emergent forms

rikki turner

Venue: INSTINC Space, 39 Keppel Rd, #03-10 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore 089065

Exhibition Duration: 27 to 30 August 2026 | Wed-Fri, 1PM-7PM. Sat - Sun, 1PM-6PM

Opening Reception: 26 August 2026 (Wed.), 5:30PM–8:30PM | RSVP

Artist Talk with Julia Winters: 29 August 2026 (Sat), 7:30-8:30PM | RSVP

Artist Studio Tour: 30 August 2026 (Sun), 2-6PM | RSVP

brief

Emergent Forms brings together a body of abstract works made through staining, pooling, layering, repetition and erasure—and through waiting, watching, interfering, then sometimes leaving things alone. Created in Singapore, the exhibition looks at the point where emotional experience, fragile materials and environmental conditions begin to blur into one another.

Rikki Turner does not begin with a fixed image. She works responsively, following what the materials do—or refuse to do—and allowing accident, resistance, humidity and mood to shape the outcome. Forms gather, leak, bloom, collapse and disappear. They might resemble cells, weather systems, bodies of water, sediment, organs, spores or unfamiliar living things. Nothing settles into a single reading.

The works hold traces of touch, moisture, pressure and time. Marks seep into one another, build up, fade and return, sometimes somewhere else. Each surface becomes a loose archive of feeling and perception, hovering between shelter and exposure, inner landscape and external weather, softness and disruption.

Singapore is not simply the setting for the work. Its humidity, heat, architecture and cultivated greenery enter the process. Nature here is lush but organised, climbing towers, filling atriums and growing within systems of control. In this environment, vulnerability becomes more than an emotional state. It is physical, environmental and shared.

Chance and repetition sit alongside quieter forms of control. Shapes appear to organise themselves, then break apart again. Things cluster, disperse, stain and vanish. What remains are traces of growth, interruption and disappearance—evidence of something that happened slowly, almost happened, or may still be happening somewhere underneath.

Emergent Forms asks how images, feelings and meanings come into being when the boundaries between body, material and environment are allowed to remain open: slightly damp, unstable and alive.

BIO of Artist Rikki turner

Rikki Turner (b. 1986, UK) is an abstract painter based in Singapore. Her practice explores how organic forms emerge through processes of staining, pooling, layering and repetition, creating images that move between cellular structures, imagined ecologies and unfamiliar landscapes.

She received a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art from the University of Westminster in 2009 and an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in 2015. She has exhibited in Singapore, London and Berlin, most recently at OLAL Gallery, Singapore. Previous exhibitions include Perpetual Days at No Format Gallery (2020), Holding One's Breath at Sid Motion Gallery (2018), 16 Artists 16 Days at The Koppel Project Hive (2017), You and Me at Display Gallery (2016), Species of Spaces and Other Pieces at Cookhouse Gallery, Chelsea College of Arts (2015), Five Floors at The Century Club (2015), Responsive Eye at London Gallery West (2011), and Nothing Gold Can Stay II at Galerie Meinblau, Berlin (2010).

Website: https://www.rikkiturner.co.uk/ | Instagram: @rikkiturnerstudio