Alexandra Searle
Overview
“My practice explores the mental and medical, drawing on my own experiences with anxiety, hypochondria and family illness." - Alexandra Searle
Alexandra fabricates objects that she finds viscerally or emotionally familiar, attempting to imagine the inner workings of her body from her position as trapped outside of it. Her objects often display their own mortality or adopt postures of dependence – a wall limply props them up or their surfaces sag. Tensions and anxieties are physically represented in the strain of the materials themselves. The visceral apprehension or empathy we may feel for the works as they collapse, rot or deflate is her attempt to bring life, and inevitably death, into the materials.
Biography
Alexandra Searle is a sculptor based in London. She graduated from a BA in Fine Art at Newcastle University in 2015, and an MFA in Fine Art Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art in 2019, where she was awarded the Nancy Balfour Scholarship and the Henriques Scholarship Prize. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the ACS Studio Prize and was a finalist in the Ingram Prize. In the same year, she was commissioned by fashion brand Bottega Veneta to create a series of sculptures for a social media campaign.
She has undertaken multiple residencies including Radical Residency at Unit 1 Gallery & Workshop (London, 2021), the Slade Summer School Art Education Residency (London, 2019) and the Empty Vessels Artist in Residence at Left Leg Gallery (Newcastle, 2015).
Selected recent exhibitions include: Ingram Prize 2022 (Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London, 2022), 58 Conduit Street, (Hypha Studios, London, 2022), Ground Work, (STUDIO WEST, London, 2022), Lost In A Just-In-Time Supply Chain, (Hypha Studios, London, 2022) Metamorphoses, (Neon Gallery, London, 2022), Changing Atmospheres, (Hestercombe Gallery, Taunton, 2022), Not Painting, (Copperfield, London, 2022), Summer Exhibition, (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2021), Harbinger of a Sweet Song, (Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London, 2021), Hot Air, (Bad Art Presents, London, 2021) and Futures 2020 (Mall Galleries, London, 2020).
Exhibitions
Works
