Want to favorite a piece or view past favorites? Confirm your email here.
Alexandra Carter: The Mother Shell from Alexandra Carter
To favorite pieces, please add your details. We'll send you an email to confirm your information.
Check your inbox and confirm your email to start favoriting.
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
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
- Alexandra Carter
- The Echo is a Body Too, 2025
- Acrylic ink and silver leaf on drafting film
- 43.5 x 30.5 in
-
$3,200
In this work, I was thinking about the sound and sensation of birth—the body as both echo and emitter. I was struck by the uncanny coloring of a newborn baby, often grey or purplish, and wondered what would happen if that inversion extended to the mother: what if her body appeared cold, stone-like, almost monstrous? The water’s ripples and silver traces suggest waves of sound or touch, reverberations between bodies.