ALEXANDRA SEARLE
she/her | b. 1992, Surrey, UK | based in London
Drawing on medical themes and the human condition from personal experiences with anxiety, Searle’s works play upon the delicate and alien nature of the corporeal existence.
We navigate our bodily needs—how to eat, breathe, move, or rest—based on vague instincts, while our inner operations remain silent and hidden, creating a disconnect from the very systems that keeps us alive. We are left wondering if others experience their bodies in the same way we do, or if we are unique in our sensations.
By playing with contrasts—inside and outside, hollows and solids, and materials fragile and unyielding—Searle aims to reconstruct the strange systems, reactions, and elusive forms that quietly operate or deteriorate within us.
Searle’s objects often evoke the body in ambiguous or playful ways. They might lean limply against a wall, their surfaces might sag, or they may even leak, embodying the tension between support and sabotage, fragility and failure.
Searle manipulates and pushes materials to their limits, physically depicting moments of stress, tension, and expectation. Aiming to expose familiar fragilities, the way in which the resulting objects collapse, slump or deflate is her attempt to bring life, and inevitably death, into her materials.
