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Alexandra Carter: The Mother Shell from Alexandra Carter

ARTIST STATEMENT

I paint the female body in states of transformation—pregnancy, birth, postpartum—to reveal the visceral realities of motherhood. I want to know how this experience consumes, ruptures, and remakes the self. I’m drawn to the monstrous feminine—the reproductive body as both feared and revered, vola

Growing up on a cranberry farm in Massachusetts, I was immersed in cycles of fertilization, growth, and harvest—rhythms that shape my work. Cranberries become metaphors for the reproductive body: swollen, fertile, bleeding. The harvest’s dependence on flooding echoes my fascination with contain

I often use my own body as a model, staging performances for the camera to explore personal and archetypal imagery. I draw from folklore and mythology, reimagining figures whose transformations mirror the physical and psychological shifts of motherhood. These mythic bodies—splitting, mutating—s

Through these paintings, I confront the contradictions of motherhood—its tenderness and violence, power and erasure, creation and consumption—an experience that is both universal and deeply personal.... more

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Alexandra Carter
All the maps change, 2023
Ink and variegated gold leaf on drafting film
72 x 48 in
$5,000

A woman’s figure is twisted and distorted, a reflection of the acrobatics she goes through to conceive (the grueling process of infertility treatment), to give birth, and to mother. She honors her first child while hoping for another, represented by the gold leaf silhouette in her engorged belly. The orb above indicates the stages of uterine growth in pregnancy, marking these passages of time as yet another set of goals to attain. The title comes from a speech given by the great author Ursula LeGuin, who was also a mother, in her call to make women’s experiences heard:
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.”