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Alexandra Carter: The Mother Shell from Alexandra Carter
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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
- Alexandra Carter
- Metrium, 2023
- Ink on drafting film
- 31 x 26 in
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I painted Metrium while pregnant with my second child. It meditates on pregnancy as well as the continued mental trauma of my fertility journey. In both stages, whether trying to conceive or finally pregnant, I always felt like this vessel that needed to mold to the whims of my reproductive system, to the demands of pregnancy, and to the child I already had. I needed my uterus to be the “perfect” vessel for embryo implantation — soft, sticky, and safe — while my body needed to be strong yet soft, a happy home for my toddler to cuddle and yet fit for the marathon that is birth (the title Metrium is taken from the name for the all-important lining of the uterus, called the endometrium). So I started making images of blobby bodies like this, which really refer to the intimate physical demands so inherent in the everyday life of a mother. There is so much touch and contact we have with the beings we grow inside and then outside of ourselves. It is beautiful and yet overwhelming. I read a passage from “Art Monster” by Laura Elkin (who wrote the book while she herself was pregnant) discussing Chris Kraus and Adrienne Rich. The passage resonates so much with my continued impulse to explore the body-as-blob, also touching upon my interest in the monstrous feminine:
In I Love Dick (1997) Kraus describes the monstrous as ‘the Blob’: mindlessly swallowing and engorging, rolling down the supermarket aisle absorbing pancake mix and jello and everyone in town. Unwise and unstoppable. The horror of The Blob is a horror of the fearless. To become The Blob requires a certain force of will. The Krausian monstrous: instead of making ourselves small, we allow our monstrous selves to grow unignorably large. Unwise and unstoppable! If Adrienne Rich calls herself a ‘poet of the oppositional imagination’, perhaps the art monster is a poet of the absorbent imagination, the aggregative imagination; she is the thief, the collage-artist, the collector, the weaver, the Blob, whose mode of subversion is to overwhelm, in an ars poetica of excess. (Art Monsters, p36-37)
It is this “ars poetica of excess” and this idea of absorbing everything around us that the maternal figure in my painting is getting at. She envelops her baby, almost swallowing it. But also, the baby is part of her. They are enmeshed and inextricable. This is how my experience of motherhood has been. My body is needed and, yes, kneaded to excess.