Alexandra Carr MRSS

Carr is an artist working with patterns in nature, natural processes and phenomena. She completed a foundation at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design and a ceramics degree at Camberwell College of Art. She has exhibited work at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, in collaboration with Jean-Paul Gaultier. She has been commissioned work from seminal musicians Radiohead, and was shortlisted for the Arts@CERN COLLIDE International Award 2016 and longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2017, 2019 and 2020. She frequently exhibits internationally and works in collaboration with cross-disciplined experts including sound designers, chemists, geologists, cosmologists and theoretical physicists. Her practice is predominantly science-based and experimental in nature and includes drawing, sculpture, kinetic works, photography, video and new media. Of particular focus is the boundary between art, science and technology. She spent six months at the artists’ collective HEIMA, in Seyðisfjorður, Iceland, as an artist in residence and mentor. She had a Leverhulme funded residency, ‘Sculpting with Light’, at Durham University, investigating medieval and modern cosmology in collaboration with a physicist, historian and cosmologist. She is currently working on new projects, and kinetic and interactive sculptures with a particular focus on phase changes, smart materials and new technologies. She is a fellow at The Institute of Advanced Studies working on an interdisciplinary project called Material Imagination to collaboratively produce biological smart materials.

Raising questions about the nature of reality and our place in the cosmos, Carr invites the viewer on a journey of awakening and enlightenment. Captivated by our quest to know the unknown, see the unseen and exist in the spaces in between, Carr presents a fleeting comprehension of an unreachable place and state of being, present but not properly understood.

At first glance, Carr’s aesthetic is elegant and sedate. On closer inspection, a subtle order and mechanism becomes apparent. Carr generates a slow drawing in of the audience, not to view an image, or a moment, but to observe change over time.  A single, transforming, crucial moment of change highlights the threshold of order to chaos where both states may exist at once. The boundaries of liminal spaces stress the notions of duality, opposites, contradiction, interplay and connectivity.

The point of observation is the focus of Carr’s work. Motion and parallax are employed to create illusion, highlighting how visual perception informs our experience of reality.

Through a manipulation of natural phenomena as media and by challenging our perception of our environment, Carr provokes change in the object and the viewer’s perspective in order to open a window into a world unknown.