Stitched & Stained

In this collaborative body of work, Alexandra Carter and Heather Beardsley mine the mythology of the monstrous feminine to meditate on societal control over women’s bodies and their personal relationships to female fertility. Deities, goddesses and demonesses such as Daphne, Callisto, Arachne, and Lilith are featured in the series, captured in their moments of transformation into animal or plant hybrids. Carter draws the figures with cranberry juice on antique, hand-embroidered linens such as old napkins and handkerchiefs, a technique that speaks to her background growing up on a cranberry farm. Beardsley then embroiders in response to the drawings, adding a new textural dimension to accentuate or disguise parts of the original image.

Female monsters from mythology almost always lack agency in their transformations, it’s something that is done to them. This resonates with the choice to represent them on second-hand textiles, as textile art has been systematically excluded from the Western art canon because it was made primarily by women in the home. Carter and Beardsley see the women that originally embroidered these pieces as their anonymous collaborators, and exhibiting them in fine art spaces as a way of reinserting them into art history while furthering contemporary art discourse around female bodies and ‘feminine craft’.