For his first exhibition in Portugal, Champ Turner presents a new project at the Carlos Machado Museum. The exhibition is based on research into archives, museum collections, and artistic practice, and explores how people in the Azores have remembered and adapted to natural disasters over time.

Champ Turner’s work brings together visual art, geography, and environmental history. He creates drawings, maps, sculptures, and videos that reflect on how landscapes change and how communities remember these changes. His work looks closely at how the land itself holds traces of disasters, how societies rebuild, and how stories are passed on.

At the Carlos Machado Museum, the exhibition unfolds through six key moments in the history of the Azores, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and agricultural crises. Each moment is presented through a simple idea related to ecology, helping visitors understand the event and its impact. Rather than telling a strict timeline, From the Ashes offers a broader story about how natural disasters have shaped life in the islands over the past five centuries.

At the heart of the exhibition is a dialogue between objects from the museum’s collection and new works created by Champ Turner. Historical objects, specimens, and documents are shown alongside artworks, encouraging visitors to see the past in new ways and to reflect on how people adapt to change.

From the Ashes presents the Azores as a place that is constantly changing, where nature and society evolve together. The exhibition invites visitors to think about disasters not only as moments of destruction, but also as events that lead to new ways of living and understanding the islands.

Biography

Champ Turner (Austin, Texas, USA, 2001) is a visual artist and researcher. He graduated from Brown University in 2024 with a degree in Visual Arts and International and Public Affairs, with distinction. He is a Fulbright Portugal fellow.

His work combines drawing, mapping, sculpture, and video, focusing on the connections between landscape, memory, and environmental change.

In 2024, he presented his solo exhibition PROVIDENCER at the List Art Center at Brown University. He received the Minnie Helen Hicks Award from the university’s Department of Visual Arts and was a finalist in competitions organized by the California Map Society and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. His work has also been published by Bloomberg CityLab and the American Geographical Society.

In 2022, he took part in Ponta Delgada in the Design with Nature program at the Rhode Island School of Design. This experience strengthened his connection to the Azores and inspired the ideas behind this exhibition.