MFA Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
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Alexandra Jo Sutton received her MFA degree in studio art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work includes sculpture, experimental photography, installation, and video. Centering on memory, time, nature, and the body, her work involves a sensitivity to materials and includes experimental practices from growing crystals to body casting. Alexandra has recently had noteworthy exhibitions at Mixed Greens Gallery in Chelsea, NYC and Marginal Utility in Philadelphia, PA. She is originally from the small town of Clanton, Alabama where she grew up eating peaches and loving animals. She lived in Philadelphia for four years while earning her MFA and working in arts administration. Now, she lives in Nashville, TN, with her four cats. She is a member of Coop Gallery, and teaches studio art/art history at Belmont University and Austin Peay State University. |
My artwork deals with themes of nature, like documenting and mapping time and cycles, creating and curating artifacts, and investigating the marks both visible and invisible that living creatures leave on and within the earth. Nature is full of traces, and a landscape is indexical to the creatures that have moved on and within it. A fossil is a fingerprint. Artifacts, like geodes, seashells, and bones, riddle through the earth like secrets and connect us to what came before, yet remain enigmatic. They make a connect-the-dots game spelling out natural history in the obscurity of a dead language. And I, human, insignificant creature, collect these unknowable ghosts from the earth. Combining mixed media processes with natural found objects, and reacting intuitively to materials, I create my own language of ritual and reverence.