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Alexandra Carter

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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Colostra by Alexandra Carter
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  • Alexandra Carter
  • Colostra, 2021
  • Ink and gold leaf on drafting film
  • 26 x 28 in
  • $2,000

I painted this piece in the raw weeks after giving birth to my first child, while navigating the ache and urgency of early breastfeeding. Colostrum—the golden yellow, fat-rich milk produced in the first days after birth, often called “liquid gold”—became both subject and symbol: nourishment, currency, demand. I was reckoning with my new identity as a milk-maker, a body suddenly measured by output, timing, and need.

At the same time, I found myself drawn to the figure of the monstrous feminine, a mother who is feral, protective, and impossibly strong. A creature who holds both tenderness and threat. In Colostra, that force erupts: the breast becomes altar, the mouth becomes portal, the body becomes a site of both production and power. The work meditates on the messy overlap between care and consumption, labor and love, human and animal, mother and monster.