Female and Flora

By: Maya Cohen, Angela Zhang, Joy Chi

Exeter alumna Alexandra Carter ’04, along with alumna Tiffanie Turner ’88, spoke to the Exeter community through virtual panel Female and Flora last Wednesday. Carter’s work is featured in the Lamont Gallery exhibit A Collective Curiosity.

Carter grew up on a cranberry farm, an experience that informs much of her paintings, where she uses cranberry juice and various botanical materials to accentuate features of the female body.

Carter gave an exclusive interview to The Exonian staff writers Maya Cohen, Angela Zhang, and Joy Chi, where she discussed coming back to Exeter and the motivations and inspirations behind her art.

How did you and Tiffanie Carter collaborate to work on this exhibition?

Tiffanie and I had actually never met before. It was Stacey Durand who kind of had the wherewithal to see the similarity in our work. I mean, if you look at our work, it's not that similar, right? But it’s more conceptual. So the fact that she is kind of working with flowers and looking at the aging and wilting of flowers, the processes of beauty, and her materials were very different from mine.

And so with my work, I'm really looking, I'm using my background, having grown up on a cranberry farm. Normally I don't think I would have ever thought to put any kind of botanical elements in my work, but because I'm really just drawn to the body, like the human figure, because I could kind of correlate it with the body and with my own story, it really started to make sense when I started using the cranberry imagery. Like bringing that into the body, kind of. Before, early in grad school, I was painting more landscape type scenery of the cranberry farm. Some of those paintings are nice, but there was something in me still that really wanted to get to a more visceral kind of imagery. I dropped the cranberry imagery for a while actually, and I dove deeper into a really intense kind of bodily and emotional human figure.

And then kind of when I moved back to the States (I was in London for grad school), I was reincorporating the cranberry imagery. I think mostly it was the process of my own thinking about fertility, which is like fertility of the land, but also fertility of my body and being at that stage of thinking of having kids.

I think that's where the similarity came up, and Stacey was really great in that she saw that duality in our work and it was really good territory to talk about, because it's really easy for me to talk about that aspect of my work, it's so much part of my foundation. And people always are kind of interested in it, because it's kind of weird. Who grows up on a cranberry farm, you know?

It's a really small industry and it's so, so specific. And I remember actually when I was at Exeter, like that was, so that was the first time I lived away from the farm. I still thought living on a cranberry farm was kind of a normal thing, but like no one knew like no one knew what that looks like or anything. I was just so conditioned to it. It was just really good to have that talk because I could really just zoom in on that aspect of my work, which was fun.

What are your motivations and inspirations?

I did a panel for a group show in California that I’m a part of, and it’s made up of all female artists, a lot of who are looking at the female body and really kind of on par with my interests, but it was really interesting. They asked the question of, ‘what is your drive and what really contributes to you making work?’ For me, I've always made work ever since I was a teeny little kid. I can't not make artwork.

And even at Exeter, I was always painting in different areas in the dorm. My teacher when I was there, she’s not there anymore, but she was amazing; she really helped me figure out how to find spaces to make work and other resources, so that was great.

But I think what I started to discover at that stage and then in college was that I really wanted to make work about the emotional body and the female body. And I talked about this the other day—the disruptive body, the disruptive female bodies. You know, we're socialized as women to really need to contain ourselves and to cover up aspects of our body. Like, we don't talk that much about birth, we don't talk that much about menstruation, you know, all of these leaky things that happen to our body, and so I feel like a lot of my drive in depicting the figure has been making a very explosive body, one that really disrupts that narrative of the need for containment. I use my materials to exploit that, like using these very, very watered down inks that make puddles that are kind of uncontrollable.

I think that has always been my overall drive, exploring both a disruptive and emotional body and then also relating that to anything that can bring it more authenticity. So, things from my own story, that's why the cranberry stuff came into play. And then later on in grad school, I think that's when I really started to research different things. Female writing actually has a lot of influence on my practice. A lot of surrealist female writing, and piecing all these different aspects together into different compositions is how I've always made work.

Are there any like specific female writers that you have in mind right now?

Yeah, the one I was really focused on, and that I wrote my thesis on in grad school was, Unica Zürn. And she was really interesting because she's an artist and an author. She wrote surrealist novellas, but she would also make anagram poetry. Her drawings were also interesting, they were these surrealist techniques of automatic drawing, and they're cool. They're not as interesting to me as her writing because her writing dives into the female psyche while still being very, entertaining and nonsensical. And I like that and I like that mix of maybe not quite nonsense, but fantasy and using fantasy in terms of allegory or representation of other kinds of ideas.

I'm really into fairy tales and using old narratives like that—fairy tales, mythology—to retell different stories. So another author that I've been into for a long time is Angela Carter. I love that she has the same last name as me, but we're not related, unfortunately. She is one of these people that rewrote a lot of fairytales and put a totally different spin on them. Really good use of language too; her style is just so colorful and beautiful, the way she tells these stories. So yeah, I'd say those two are my main influences.

What were challenges you faced preparing the pieces for this exhibit or preparing for the panel?

I mean, making pieces for me is always just a huge challenge. It's this very long process of decision-making mostly, and because a lot of it is very free flowing, right? And then what happens half the time is I make something bad and I have to just put that piece aside for a long time or just throw it in the trash. And I hate wasting my time, but it's part of the process. It's just part of the game and to have to accept that. I think that's always my challenge.

And then for preparing for the panel, I don't think that was challenging at all, because I feel like having a narrow focus of just thinking about the kind of botanical aspects of the work is really nice. And knowing that my prepared talk would just be 10 minutes was way less scary. So it's always a challenge, but a really good challenge because I always feel so good afterwards to have shared. I'm so used to sharing images and I feel like people just get such a deeper insight into the work if they hear me talk about it. I always feel better afterwards.

How did it feel to present to your old high school?

Great! I still definitely credit Exeter with a for a lot of my development. And I think in a lot of ways it was similar to grad school for me because I was really pushed in the areas that I felt most uncomfortable. When I got to Exeter, I realized I really had to step up my game. I'm not very good at science or math or languages. I like the fact that it pushed me in those areas; I hated it at the time, but I just have such fun memories of my community there. I think that the best part of Exeter was the peers I had and how it opened me up to the world because it's an international student body and it's so amazing in that sense. Presenting in that context is really wonderful and fun because it will hopefully be seen by the current students at Exeter, but it’s also for some of my peers to tune into, and it's just a fun way to reconnect.