Alexandra Metcalf (b. 1992) is a London-born, New York based artist. Her hand-crafted works address the social and personal history of femininity in conjunction with themes of fantasy, identification, domesticity, anxiety and loss. Drawing on a personal archive of specific traditions of craft and ornamentation (Brit-Punk, The Arts and Crafts Movement, and Victorian England), Metcalf elaborately allegorizes and reimagines the mother-daughter dyad. Her works have previously been exhibited at Fitzpatrick Gallery (FR), LOMEX (NYC), Downs and Ross (NYC), and Ginny on Frederick (UK).

Taken in the studio during the production of works for Liste, Alexandra, a self proclaimed sentimentalist, shares a series of objects below from her studio accompanied by personal reflections and thoughts:

A birthday present I cherish from close friend Ben Morgan Cleveland - artist and gallerist - a beautiful pinhole image of a river.

I've held on to this as long as I can remember, an opera mask from Venice that belonged to my Mother. I keep drawing inspiration from it, feels haunted which is great.

I'm an obsessive archiver of old zines, sometimes feeling like half my process is research and collecting. This No Mag (LA punkzine) from the 80's had a great flyer in it that I reappropriated for a recent show. Theft and collage are the life blood of the avant garde.

This Turkish dancer lamp was my Grandmothers - she was Sephardic and lived in a village called Çorlu, just north of Istanbul, before she immigrated to the US. She was superstitious and mystical; growing up I was told we are descendants of a famous fortune teller. I have a proclivity towards the darker sides of the mystical so trying to stay away from that for now.

Old comics!!! Huge Vaughn Bodē fan! In high school I lived by an old comic book store and would often draw from them or cut them up and make my own zines.

I started teaching myself how to work with stained glass a year ago and currently experimenting with these scraps of glass. They have been screenprinted with lead pigments and then fired. It's fun to confront almost stale ornamental crafts from history.

This is nerdy but love this cosplay pipboy from Fallout, used to play a lot with my friend Raf Foster.

a little nook - Nicorette is the most important thing in the studio.

Such a sweet gift from one of my closest friends Anna Pierce. I unwrapped it and was so shocked because I had this saved on my Etsy favourites for years and had no idea how she knew. But later she told me she went online and looked at my favourites which is a really good hack to get someone something they really want. I cherish it. Love Anna.

This psycho daddy-issues shrine. My Mom made these silk screens of my Father and I happen to have a lot of them. I've been trying to work out the right context to show them but it hasn’t happened yet.

My high school art was usually cutting up things and reassembling them and I made these little figures out of my anxiety medication bottles - there's a face in the stars when you shake it. Its pretty morbid now but its one of the few things from that time that I kept. High school is really hard.

Old sculpture playing with bending silverware, a sort of weathervane cane….

A gift from the amazing painter Phoebe Nesgos, incredible find - they look like hooves and I’m excited to make something with them.

Another souvenir from high school, my first foray into ceramics and probably my last. I was really into David Shrigley and Martin Creed.

Had a stint of only thinking about lambs and spinning wheels, exploring gendered labor from history but very happy to put a pause on the heavy Christian symbols. It also touches on this interest in spiritual psychosis that I was dealing with for a moment. Now have lots of dead lamb fragments around the studio that sort of just stay there.

Retrokink, 2023

Oil and decoupage on linen

91.5 x 60.5cm