Alexandra Searle British , b. 1992

Alexandra Searle is a sculptor based in London. After studying Fine Art at Newcastle University, graduating in 2015, she went on to complete an MFA in Fine Art Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Drawing on references to the mental and the medical from her own experiences with anxiety and hypochondria, and the disquiets of our time, her sculptures play upon the tensions, fragilities and failures involved when trying to keep ourselves in a delicate equilibrium, both in body and mind. Familiar at a visceral level, her sculptures are concerned with too-muchness – when substances and materials reflect our fears or desires, and in the process, become unmanageable, uncontainable or gluttonous, escaping from their restraints in bulges of protest.

Combining the industrial and solid with the fragile and decaying, Alexandra is chiefly inspired by the behavior of materials themselves; concrete recalls its former liquidity, or metals corrode over time. Searle examines the medicines and mechanisms we utilise in our attempts, in desperation or gluttony, to satisfy and mend our bodies. The visceral apprehension or empathy we may feel for the works as they collapse, corrode or deflate is her attempt to bring life, and inevitably death, into her materials.