Self-portrait, Alexandra McCurdy

3 Questions: Artist & Curator in Conversation

1. Describe your working process? 

My work has long been inspired by patterns and motifs drawn from women's textiles, by women's central role in Western textile history, and by my mother's involvement in the British yard goods industry earlier last century. 

My new series of boxes merge the techniques of textiles and clay, decorative surface and form. In earlier work, the slip trailed textile patterns and symbols were applied to the surface of the ceramic pieces, fired and then glazed.  With these latest boxes, the coloured porcelain slip is trailed, layer upon layer, in opposite directions, until enough thickness is built up to support itself.  I am, in essence, weaving the slip, with a warp and a weft.  Each component is fired, then wired together to intentionally utilize the feminine principal of containment and enclosure. 

The box is a potent metaphor for women in ceramics. It is the perfect vessel for containing what we cannot control. My porcelain boxes utilize the feminine principal of containment and enclosure. I have embellished the external in an ambiguous way and left the inner workings to the viewer's imagination.  

2. What was your source of inspiration for your work in the exhibition? How did the act of art making help in reflecting and respond to the pandemic? 

The images of Covid 19 kept flashing across my computer screen, and my wish was to interpret that image in my own way and with my own materials.  The copper wire I used was soft enough to knot into the grids, but also strong enough to stand on its own.  I wanted to use a material that looked dangerous. 

The process of slowly knotting the copper wire into the grid was laborious and time consuming. As I knotted two rows at a time, I listened to the radio and all the dire forecasts of things to come, and felt mildly comforted by the simple process of knotting. It helped me cope on a daily basis. It was almost zen like, and once my knotting was completed for the day, it made me feel as if I had accomplished something worthwhile.  In essence, it gave me a sense of purpose. 

3. How do you think the visual arts helps us understand the complex world around us? 

There are five senses for understanding the world, sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch.  Visual art contains many or most of those senses.  In my Box with Copper Wire, the senses of sight and touch are used mainly, taste and smell are also present.  As artists, we report what is happening in our worlds, in hopes that our audience will understand our perspective and think differently about their own.