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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
Hymn to Demeter, 2023
Ink and image transfers on drafting film
68 x 36 in
$4,000

Vessels, seeds, mythology and motherhood imbue this composition. I see this piece as a kind of recipe or sequence, each ingredient comprising different seasons of womanhood or motherhood. The pregnant mother’s belly is morphing into the baby itself, while the vessel beneath her, with its snakes and multiple openings, represents fertility with ancient symbolism. The figure on the right is Baubo, the goddess of “full belly laughs” who helps Demeter bring life back to the land after the loss of her daughter Persephone. The image transfers of cranberries indicate my own background and agricultural fertility, which I think act as seeds, inseminating this powerful recipe with the juice it needs to nurture and grow. It is a “hymn” to Demeter, paying homage to fertility stories old and new.