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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 Ripening, 2021
Ink on drafting film
42 x 49 in
$3,000

I referenced photos taken during one of my “self-performances” (private performances for my camera, which often instigate new paintings) of myself while pregnant. I painted this in the postpartum period while at an artist residency in Finland, where sweaty sauna culture had me reflecting on images of heat, of release and catharsis, in parallel to the transformations my body had just been through (fertility treatment, pregnancy, birth and its aftermath). I chose the title “The Ripening” to continue a dialogue around the use of terminology pertaining to both agriculture and the female body (in homage to my cranberry farming upbringing).