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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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Hexentanz by Alexandra Carter
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  • Alexandra Carter
  • Hexentanz, 2023
  • Ink, oil and variegated metal leaf on drafting film
  • 41 x 45 in
  • $3,400

Mother-and-child imagery takes a grotesque twist, melding with abstract forms based on geological formations, and rained down upon with a gold-leafed pattern that connotes blood, milk, sweat, or other bodily fluids. I specifically referenced the hands of German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman for the witchy, conjuring limbs that frame the bodies. She is known for a dance titled “Hexentanz” (“witch dance”), to which I pay homage in the painting’s title. The body language here suggests a vampiric relationship between mother and child, tapping into both maternal ambivalence and utter devotion, while navigating my experience with infertility treatment and postpartum healing.