Bianca Turner SVS MFA Student Solo Exhibition and Residency at William Woods University

Bianca Turner,  a ceramic artist and second-year MFA candidate at the University of Missouri in the School of Visual Studies, has received the honor of being accepted into Kemper School of the Arts 2025 Artist in Residency program located at William Woods University in Fulton, Missouri. A part of the residency is to exhibit her work at the Mildred M. Cox Gallery on their campus. Over the summer of 2025, Turner worked on her pieces and moved them from Columbia to Fulton. The exhibition entitled “Unfortunately, I have to show you the parts of myself I tried to hide.” had a reception at the gallery on September 10, 2025. 

Turner’s work confronts vulnerability — an emotional excavation made tangible. Using clay, She builds bulbous, abstract shapes that suggest bodies, growths, or emotions that have nowhere else to go but out. These sculptures are not planned; they swell, cluster, and lean into the weight of grief, frustration, and desire.But there is also play. The colors, the scale, the awkwardness of form — all push the work into something unruly and alive. 

Turner is drawn to that tension, “between grief and joy, collapse and buoyancy, hiding and being seen.Clay is both forgiving and unforgiving. It records every touch and responds to pressure with either collapse or strength. In that way, it becomes a companion — one that carries both the weight I try to repress and the energy that breaks through unexpectedly.” Overall, this body of work is not about resolution. It is about endurance, play, discomfort, and the complicated act of being witnessed.

Turner’s training has taken place over several years. She holds a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Hartford and has previously completed a long-term residency at the Worcester Center for Crafts in Worcester, Massachusetts. Influenced by her Jamaican heritage, Bianca explores the relationship between the human body, emotion, and identity through abstract ceramic forms. Using hand-building techniques, she creates textured, organic sculptures that embody strength, vulnerability, and transformation. Her work engages color and surface as psychological and emotional tools, inviting personal reflection. Bianca’s work has been exhibited nationally, and she has also been a recipient of the NCECA Multicultural Fellowship and the Artaxis Fellowship. You can find more of Bianca's work at her personal website linked below or find her on Instagram at @bia.yonce