MEMBER FEATURE:

Our monthly Member Feature aims to showcase the talent that occupies our buildings and celebrate their work.

This month’s feature coincides with Black History Month, and we’re honored to spotlight Rockella Space Member Nala C. Turner, a multidisciplinary visual artist and creative arts therapist whose practice spans ceramics, sculpture, somatics, and art therapy. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Turner’s work explores perception and time—examining how individual and collective identities are shaped within cultural frameworks and across historical continuities. Grounded in lived experiences kindred to Black communities, her practice draws on history, ritual, and recognizable cultural symbols to challenge restrictive narratives and reimagine representations of Black identity within popular culture. Through clay-work in particular, Turner treats material as both archive and vessel, using it to question systems of representation, confront racial stereotypes, and reauthor histories of self-perception and cultural understanding.

Turner’s work has been exhibited widely, including her 2024 solo public artwork Healing Landscapes as a Socrates Park Fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY. Her collaborative projects include large-scale permanent public artworks with Nekisha Durrett, such as Queen City (2023), a memorial addressing the displacement of Black residents for the construction of the Pentagon, and Hem of Heaven (in production), a ceramic installation reimagining Harriet Tubman’s shawl. Alongside her studio practice, Turner is deeply committed to healing-centered work, bringing art-making into educational and mental health spaces as a means of reflection, embodiment, and wellbeing.

To learn more about the creatives who call Rockella Space home, head over to the People page for a full list of in-depth interviews.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Nala C. Turner, and I am a visual artist and licensed therapist working across multiple disciplines of art-making and healing, including ceramics, sculpture, somatics, and art therapy. I was born in Saint Louis, MO, and moved to New York in 2018 to attend Pratt Institute, where I earned my Master’s in Art Therapy & Creativity Development.

As an art therapist, I practice a multiform, bottom-up approach that integrates the creative process with evidence-based modalities such as psychotherapy, somatic therapy, and CBT to provide high-quality treatment. I work within strength-based, Humanistic, Behavioral, and trauma-informed frameworks, depending on the needs of the client. I holdspecialties in working with Black, brown, and multi-ethnic individuals experiencing depression, anxiety, or panic, complex trauma, and relationship or social transitions. My clinical interests include somatic therapy, the use of clay as a therapeutic medium, and improving mental health outcomes for people of color.

As a visual artist, I work in both functional and sculptural formats, drawing from histories, rituals, and identities within Black culture to investigate culturally restrictive barriers and transubstantiate the representation of Black people within popular culture. Much of my work is intentionally community-based, public, or environments that feel safe enough to question narrative, perception, and cultural understanding.

How long have you been at Rockella Space, and what do you value most about having a studio at One Eyed Studios—particularly in terms of community and connection with other artists in the building?

I have been at Rockella One Eyed Studios for two years (since January 2024). My favorite thing about having a studio there is being surrounded by other artists, creatives, and business owners. I unfortunately have not had the opportunity to create a community within the building, but I have helped grow it. I have a fellow colleague who is also an art therapist who was looking to start their own private practice as well and joined the space in 2025.

Your practice lives at the intersection of art-making and healing. How do these two roles, visual artist and art therapist, inform one another in your daily studio practice?

My training as an art therapist shapes how I approach the studio with an emphasis on process over product. I work attentively and at a measured pace, allowing bodily sensation, intuition, and emotional response to guide form. Clay reflects many of the same bottom-up therapeutic principles I use in clinical work: offering experiences of regulation, containment, resistance, and release. This material relationship influences both my formal decisions and how I understand meaning as something that develops through sustained engagement.

My role as a visual artist, in turn, strengthens my therapeutic work. Engaging with history, ritual, and Black cultural narratives reinforces the importance of context, symbolism, and authorship in healing. Creating functional and sculptural works that invite interaction or communal participation keeps my practice rooted in the idea that healing is relational and culturally situated. The studio becomes a space for questioning dominant narratives and reimagining representation through material.

Rather than existing as separate practices, art-making and therapy continuously inform one another. The studio is where therapeutic thinking becomes tactile, and where artistic inquiry is shaped by care, attunement, and embodied awareness.

Clay is central to both your artwork and therapeutic work. What is it about ceramics that makes it such a powerful material for exploring the inner world and embodied experience?

Few art materials kindle growth like clay. Fostering a space to immerse oneself in a felt experience, clay is that medium that is naturally responsive to human feelings. It’s as if it has the vigorous power to accurately and concretely absorb an individual’s emotions at any given moment. And in doing so, it yields to their deepest feelings, providing no barriers or blockages to the line of expression. At times when our deepest thoughts and feelings are controlled by anxiety or hidden beyond our obvious awareness, clay conveniently has a way of recovering balance without the need for verbalization. It gives the opportunity to become deeply introspective. The motions of molding, shaping, carving, and wedging become part of cathartic manipulation, creating space to more clearly grasp our problems or traits of ourselves less seen fully-faced.

Many of us often struggle to let ourselves “feel”. It is within art-making that the resistance to showing emotions deemed vulnerable is penetrated and unearthed. The process of feeling becomes no longer led by an excuse of “survival” or “beyond words or others comprenhension”. Alternatively, it is led by the expression of the Self to oneself. The process becomes purgative – giving space to decipher the ambiguous and often confusing flow of sensations in the body.

You’ve described your work as being deeply concerned with perception and time. How do these concepts show up differently in your personal artwork versus your work with clients?

Perception and time function differently in my personal artwork than they do in my work with clients, though both are grounded in embodied experience and material engagement.

In my personal art practice, perception is something I intentionally challenge and disrupt. I use clay, form, and cultural reference to slow the viewer down and ask them to reconsider how Black bodies, histories, and identities are seen, interpreted, or misread. Time in this context is layered and expansive – moving between ancestral memory, cultural history, and the present moment. The work often asks viewers to sit with ambiguity, repetition, and duration, allowing meaning to unfold rather than resolve quickly. Time becomes a tool for contemplation, ritual, and re-authoring narrative.

In therapeutic work, perception and time are approached more gently and with greater immediacy. Perception centers on helping clients notice internal experience – sensations, emotions, and thought patterns – as they arise in the present moment. Time is paced according to the nervous system and the client’s capacity, emphasizing safety, regulation, and responsiveness. Rather than stretching time conceptually, therapy often works to slow it down, creating space for reflection, integration, and grounding within a contained structure.

History, ritual, and Black cultural identity are recurring elements in your visual practice. How do you navigate holding space for collective histories while also honoring individual healing processes?

I approach collective history and individual healing as interconnected rather than competing concerns, but they require different kinds of attention depending on the context.

In my visual practice, history and ritual function as shared reference points – ways of acknowledging inherited narratives, cultural memory, and the systems that shape how Black identity is constructed and perceived. By working with materials like clay and creating forms that invite interaction or communal presence, I’m able to hold space for collective experience without prescribing a singular meaning. The work remains open enough for viewers to locate themselves within it, bringing their own memories, interpretations, and relationships to history.

In therapeutic settings, honoring collective histories means recognising how culture, race, and intergenerational experience inform a client’s internal world, while staying grounded in their specific needs and lived reality. I don’t ask clients to carry collective narratives unless they are meaningful or supportive to their healing. Instead, I focus on creating conditions where individuals can move at their own pace, articulate their own experiences, and decide what aspects of history or identity feel relevant in the moment.

Your studio at One Eyed Studios functions as more than a place of production—it’s a site of care. How does the physical space of the studio contribute to healing, reflection, or transformation?

My studio at One Eyed Studios is intentionally structured to support making, reflection, and embodied engagement, Its placement within an active artist studios building is central to that intention – being surrounded by other creative practices reinforces the idea that access to creativity is essential, not seperate from healing. From an art therapy perspective, proximity to ongoing artistic process can be grounding and orienting, offering a sense of connection and possibility through shared creative labor.

The physical layout of the studio supports multiple modes of engagement. The space allows for 2D and 3D art-making, seated conversation, and embodied practices such as meditation, breathwork, and somatic exploration. This flexibility makes it possible to shift between expression, dialogue, and regulation depending on what is needed in the moment, rather than prioritizing a single way of working.

The studio is also arranged with attention to nervous system responsiveness and choice. Meditation cushions, tactile regulation materials, and grounding supports create opportunities for slowing down and re-centering, while areas for conversation support, verbal processing, and reflection.

In projects like Healing Landscapes, your work enters the public realm. What does it mean to you to create healing-centered work in communal or outdoor spaces?

Creating healing-centered work in communal or outdoor spaces means placing art and wellness in environments that are shared, lived-in, and accessible, rather than contained within private or institutional settings. These spaces allow healing to feel relational and collective, shaped by presence, movement, and interaction with both people and place. Environmental elements – weather, sound, shifting activity – become part of the work, encouraging responsiveness, grounding, and embodied awareness. Working this way also broadens who can engage with healing-centered practices, making creative and embodied experiences feel more approachable, culturally rooted, and connected through shared time and participation.

As an art therapist, you speak about clay as a symbol of one’s inner world. Can you share how symbolic making helps people access emotions or experiences that may be difficult to articulate verbally?

Symbolic making allows people to approach their inner experience indirectly, which can feel safer and more accessible than trying to explain it in words. Clay, in particular, responds immediately to touch, pressure, and movement, often reflecting emotional states before they are consciously named. Through form, texture, and gesture, internal experiences can take shape without needing to be fully understood or articulated right away.

When someone works symbolically, they are able to externalize feelings, memories, or sensations and relate to them from a slight distance. This can reduce overwhelm and create space for curiosity rather than self-judgment. A shape, object, or surface quality can hold complexity – contradiction, uncertainty, or emotion – without requiring linear explanation. Over time, the symbol becomes a point of reference that supports reflection and dialogue, allowing meaning to emerge organically and at the individual’s pace.

Your work actively challenges racial stereotypes and dominant narratives in popular culture. How do you see art as a tool for reauthoring identity—both personally and collectively?

Art allows me to shape and reclaim narratives that have historically misrepresented Black identity. Personally, it offers a space to explore and assert my own experiences; collectively, it creates opportunities for communities to see themselves reflected in fuller, more complex ways, challenging stereotypes and expanding how identity is understood and valued.

You’ve worked across institutional, nonprofit, and private-practice settings. How has moving between these contexts shaped your understanding of accessibility and care in art-making?

Working across institutional, nonprofit, and private-practice settings has made the gaps in accessibility around art-making and mental health very visible to me. In many institutional or nonprofit contexts, access is often framed through rigid structures – either positioned as something reserved for those with financial privilege or offered in ways that can feel extractive, performative, or disconnected from the actual needs of the communities being served. While these spaces can provide resources and reach, they often come with limitations that shape who feels welcome, who feels understood, and who ultimately benefits.

Moving into private practice allowed me to engage accessibility more directly and intentionally. Offering a sliding scale is not just a financial decision for me, but a response to how mental health tools are distributed and understood, particularly for Black, brown, and multi-ethnic communities who are frequently excluded or misrepresented in traditional systems. Working across these contexts has clarified that accessibility is not only about cost – it’s about language, cultural responsiveness, flexibility, and trust. It has pushed me to think critically about how art-making can function as a meaningful, respectful resource rather than a gatekept or commodified experience.

Looking ahead, how do you hope your practice, both as an artist and therapist, continues to evolve, and what kinds of healing spaces do you feel most compelled to create next?

Going forward, I hope my practice continues to expand into more public spaces, where art and healing can be experienced collectively. I’m, interested in creating environments – both physical and conceptual – that invite engagement, reflection, and dialogue, whether through large-scale installations, outdoor projects, or participatory workshops. These spaces would prioritize accessibility, cultural resonance, and embodied experience, allowing people to connect with creativity as a tool for understanding, regulation, and transformation. Ultimately, I want my work to continue bridging art and therapy in ways that are visible and interactive, offering opportunities for both personal insight and shared experience.

If you were to invite anyone alive or dead to a dinner party, who would be on your guest list?

Octavia Butler, Cecily Tyson, Tupac Shakur, and my Grandma.

What advice would you give to artists or art therapists with similar backgrounds to yours who are thinking about moving to New York City and pursuing a life in the art world?

Make your own opportunities. Success in the art world doesn’t always come from popularity or external validation. Focus on the work that makes you proud, that challenges and excites you. When you create something that feels meaningful to you, that’s when youve truly “made it”. NYC can be overwhelming, but staying grounded in your own vision and values will guide you through the noise and help you build a practice that lasts.

What projects/exhibitions have you got coming up?

POW! The Protest Cup exhibition at NCECA 2026 in Detroit (Ironic use of ceramic cups as a subversive protest platform, on a rather small object).

Companion Gallery Last Call XI (Handmade Ceramics for Storing, Pouring & Sipping Fine Libations).

Hem of Heaven by Nekisha Durrett (Contracted artisan for collaborative large-scale public artwork composed of thousands of handmade, perforated ceramic tiles).

Where can people see your work in IRL or online, and how can people contact you for a studio visit and/or therapy session?

website: https://carlynneceramics.com/

instagram: @carlynne.ceramics

email: nala@carlynneceramics.com