Alexandra Carr
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.
Carr is an international, experimental artist working on a wide range of interdisciplinary projects in partnership with Oxford University and Durham University. The work makes responses to natural processes and phenomena, such as magnetism, light, growth and ice structures. Carr’s practice involves collaboration with experts and world-leading researchers including engineers, biologists, geologists, cosmologists and theoretical physicists. The works produced are experimental in nature and include drawing, sculpture, kinetic works, photography, video and new media.
Carr has exhibited work at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, in collaboration with Jean-Paul Gaultier, been commissioned work by 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. Carr is a member of The Royal Society of Sculptors.
Carr frequently exhibits and works internationally including the Verket Museum, Sweden and project spaces in Iceland, spending six months at the artists’ collective HEIMA, in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, as an artist in residence and mentor.
Carr was awarded a Leverhulme funded residency in Durham 2017 entitled ‘Sculpting with Light’, investigating medieval and modern cosmology in collaboration with physicists, historians and cosmologists. She has presented papers at Oxford and Durham Universities and MIT, and has taken part in panel discussions at Sotheby’s and the Science Gallery Dublin.
Carr was recently Artist in Residence at Durham University, working on themes of environment and place in connection with the elements and cosmology. In 2020 she was a fellow at The Institute of Advanced Studies working on an interdisciplinary project called Material Imagination to collaboratively produce biological smart materials. Carr is currently working on new projects, kinetic and interactive sculptures with a particular focus on phase changes, organic processes, optics and origami. In 2021 Solaris Nexum she completed at Technological University Dublin, the largest permanent commission of Carr’s practice to date. In 2023 she established Torus Torus Studios, a joint practice with Colin Rennie which specialises in public art. In 2024 they unveiled Only Breath, a major kinetic artwork commissioned by Science Museum, London, as the centrepiece for the Energy Revolution Gallery.
