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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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MACROcarpon by Alexandra Carter
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  • Alexandra Carter
  • MACROcarpon, 2022
  • Ink and image transfer on drafting film
  • 41 x 41 in
  • $3,000

In this piece, I transferred a big photograph of a cranberry from a photo I took at my family’s cranberry farm. I printed it out huge on my laser printer and transferred it onto the film using Xylene solvent. I painted over it with some ink layers, then I decided it needed some life inside it. So I made a silhouette of a baby by pouring more xylene over the photo, and removing some of the pigment within that photo transfer. Now, it mimics the kind of ultrasound images you see throughout pregnancy, where a subtle shift of the technician’s wand creates such ghostly, near abstract images.
The title “MACROcarpon” is taken from the latin word for the American cranberry, Vaccinium Macrocarpon.