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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
Spumadonna, 2019
Ink on drafting film
59 x 48 in
$3,000

I reference the Sheela-na-Gig, a mysterious fertility figure found across medieval Europe, celebrated for her yonic power. From her form emerges a cascade of cranberries, created using an image transfer from a photograph I took during the harvest at my family’s cranberry farm. This work, created during an artist residency in the wine-rich Piedmont region of Italy, draws parallels between the agricultural fertility of the area and my origins on New England cranberry bogs. The title Spumadonna merges the Italian word for “bubbling” (spumante, as in sparkling wine) with “woman,” encapsulating the interplay of abundance, effervescence, and femininity.