Alexandra Searle MRSS

My works play upon the delicate and alien nature of the corporeal existence. My recent aim is to make objects that are familiar to me, viscerally or emotionally, attempting to imagine the inner workings of my body from my position trapped outside of it. Playing with outsides and insides, hollows and solids, materials flimsy and unyielding, I recreate the strange systems, reactions and inaccessible masses that silently function or deteriorate within me.

Vague or tongue-in-cheek in their references to the body, my objects often adopt postures, or display their own mortality. A wall limply props them up, their surfaces sag, or they are incontinent. They are being used, using others, or else failing to support themselves. They are our failures and fragilities, however comic or serious. Often, both simultaneously.

Tensions and anxieties are often physically represented in the strain of the materials themselves. Concrete recalls its former liquidity, or consumable liquids gradually decay. The visceral apprehension or empathy we may feel for the works as they collapse, rot or deflate is my attempt to bring life, and inevitably death, into my materials.

After studying Fine Art at Newcastle University graduating in 2015, I went on to complete an MFA in Fine Art Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019 where I was awarded the Nancy Balfour Scholarship and the Henriques Scholarship Prize. In 2022 I was a finalist in the ACS Studio Prize and also in the 2022 Ingram Prize 2020. Recent exhibitions include Summer Exhibition (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2021), Harbinger of a Sweet Song (Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, 2021), Not Painting (Copperfield Gallery, London, 2022), Hot Air (Bad Art Presents, London, 2021) and Futures 2020 (Mall Galleries, London, 2020).