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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
The Long After, 2025
Acrylic ink on drafting film
84 x 48 in
$4,500

After birth, the body feels both ancient and new—
a vessel shedding, rooting, remembering.
What remains, what grows, what keeps becoming.

Furthering my exploration of the mother-and-child motif, The Long After meditates on the metamorphic quality of the postpartum body. The figure—part woman, part shell, perhaps even part tree—suggests something simultaneously earthly and otherworldly, tender and monstrous. Drawn from images of myself with my son in the postpartum period, the work evokes mythic origins and natural forms, from the birth of Adonis to the grain of bark and the strata of stone.