Kenley Turner

Ghostgrl Studio

Kenley Turner is a mixed-media visual artist and musician born and raised in Dallas, Texas. There, she attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts to study and focus on guitar. Throughout her time there, she studied classical and contemporary guitar, played in several ensembles, and wrote original music. During this time, outside of school, she spent most of her time performing and in a rock band, she is a lead guitarist for, The Bombs! 
The immersive exposure to the arts she received at Booker T. Washington introduced Kenley to many performance Artists who combined music, performing, and visual art into a singular medium, which she became extremely interested in. From this point, she went on to study visual arts at Kansas City Art Institute and she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture. As of now, she lives as a working artist in Dallas, Texas as a working artist creating fashion, music, sculptures, and paintings as a means of world-building to promote imagination, self-expression, and personal liberation. She also is the studio manager at Oil and Cotton, a studio in Dallas that focuses on bringing art education to the community.   

Kenley's work focuses on the blurred boundaries between tangible reality and the ethereal realms of the subconscious, dreams, childhood memories, and collective unconscious. Her art challenges the idea that alternate states are more authentic than our everyday experience. 
Her pieces place the viewers in a position to see through the eyes of the hero in a monomyth, mirroring the experiences of youth navigating through existentialism, coming of age, and teetering between escapism and reality.  These themes tap into something fundamental within us, sparking questions about our relationship with time, the digital realm, spirituality, and mortality.
Kenley is captivated by mythical creatures such as dragons, ghosts, and mermaids and the roles these motifs play historically. These fantastical beings, recurring across cultures and centuries, create a universal, collective unconscious that unites humanity. 
Kenley sees her artwork as a way to move between worlds, to bridge the immaterial and the concrete, digital and physical, and to bring the things that are alive in her heart and imagination into the material realm.